Kristin Janz

I finally had a chance to read the other stories in the Imaginarium 2012 anthology, the one that reprinted my story “The Kiss of the Blood-Red Pomegranate” from Aoife’s Kiss.  There are a lot of great stories in here!  I think my favorite was Madeline Ashby’s “The Education of Junior Number 12″, about androids who fall in love with humans (although that simple description fails to convey the wonderful characterizations, and the thoughtful portrayal of the sort of effect this might have on human relationships).

I also loved Geoffrey W. Cole’s “On the Many Uses of Cedar”, a story reminiscent of Groundhog Day in which the reader’s sense of who the villain is shifts from the easy assumption implied by the opening; Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s “Laikas 1″, about a woman inexplicably followed by a growing pack of feral dogs; Gemma Files’s “Signal to Noise”, about an ex-CIA agent who seems to be sending messages to his former boss from beyond the grave; Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s “A Puddle of Blood”, a very unusual vampire romance; Derek Kunsken’s “To Live and Die in Gibbontown”, with its intelligent macaques, bonobos, and gibbons in an apparently post-human world; and Ada Hoffmann’s creepy “Centipede Girl”.

Imaginarium also includes poetry, and while I don’t know poetry well enough to feel I can speak intelligently about it, I especially liked Peter Chiykowski’s “The Cinder Girl” and Carolyn Clink’s “10 Things to Know About Staplers” (although I’m not sure the latter is actually a poem; I’m not sure what to call it, really).

Imaginarium 2012 is the first installment in what is expected to be an annual anthology of the best Canadian speculative fiction and poetry (“speculative” being an umbrella term for science fiction, fantasy, and horror).  For those of you who, like me, grew up in Canada, don’t worry:   it isn’t all slow, meditative work about the bleakness of the vast Canadian landscape.  (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)  There are stories in the anthology set in the Canadian wilderness, while others take place in South America, Africa, Europe, or the Middle East.  According to the anthology editors, Canadian speculative fiction simply means “speculative fiction written by Canadians”; if there was any other measure of “Canadian-ness” used to select stories, I couldn’t see evidence of it here.

Imaginarium is still available, either directly from the publisher, or from any of the major online retailers.

Donald got two Roman cookbooks for his last birthday, to add to our collection.  The Classical Cookbook, by Andrew Dalby and Sally Grainger, includes both ancient Greek and ancient Roman recipes; Cooking Apicius, by Grainger, is a selection of modernized recipes from the only extant ancient Roman cooking manual.

I already owned Mark Grant’s Roman Cookery, Ilaria Gozzini Giacosa’s A Taste of Ancient Rome (translated by Anna Herklotz), and Joseph Dommers Vehling’s 1936 translation of the Apicius manual.

I had found Giacosa’s cookbook more useful and authentic than Grant’s.  Both consist of recipes adapted for a modern kitchen, inspired by ancient food, but Giacosa always starts with the original Latin text for a recipe (usually from Apicius, but occasionally from Cato’s or Columella’s treatises on agriculture).  Then she provides a translation, then a modernized recipe.  This way, you can see her thought process in developing the final recipe.

Grant’s cookbook doesn’t always provide such clear antecedents, and I’m not as happy with his ingredient substitutions.  He calls for Cheddar in numerous recipes where ricotta, feta, or a simple goat cheese would probably be more authentic.  The ancient Romans used the milk of sheep and goats, but not cows’ milk.  However, the real fatal flaw is his use of meat stock made from bouillon cubes.  I can’t take any cookbook author who recommends bouillon cubes seriously.*

We did try one recipe from Grant’s cookbook, the one for hydromel, or honey water.  It wasn’t very successful, but I don’t think it’s entirely his fault, as it’s actually one of his most historically authentic recipes, reproducing the exact proportions suggested by Bassus in Country Matters (3:2:1 water/honey/apple juice).  It was far too sweet, even diluted with 3 parts water.  However, as Donald describes on his blog, we were able to salvage it by adding apple cider vinegar.  As I know from wine tasting, sweet drinks aren’t as cloying if they also contain enough acid to balance the sugar.  I’m not sure if the recipe didn’t work because ancient Roman apple juice wasn’t as sweet as modern apple cider, or if the Romans just had a major sweet tooth.  (I should point out that Donald prepared this recipe; he suggested elsewhere on his blog that I may not have been adequately crediting his contributions to our Roman dinners.)

Giacosa’s cookbook tends to suggest ricotta when an ancient recipe calls for cheese, and allows the cook to decide how they’re going to prepare their stock.  The recipes generally sound more authentic, and more likely to taste good.  Donald and I have prepared her pork stew with apples, and globi.  The pork stew is from Apicius, and the globi are a dessert fritter from Cato.  Both were fairly successful, and I’ve written about this meal elsewhere on my blog.

I do think that she’s off with her proportions for the pork stew, not enough herb and spice, and too much defrutum (concentrated wine or grape syrup) for sweetening.  Since the original recipes rarely give quantities of ingredients, it really is up to the cook’s discretion.  However, the Latin text calls for “a bit of defrutum“, which Giacosa interprets to mean 1/2 cup for about 2 pounds of meat and a pound of apples.  Donald and I probably didn’t use the best substitute for defrutum.  We used grape juice concentrate from a winemaking store, which I suspect was too sweet and concentrated.  Even so, defrutum was probably very sweet and syrupy, like expensive balsamic vinegar or the Italian sapa you can sometimes buy from specialty food stores.  1/2 cup is a lot.

Another issue is that, throughout her cookbook, Giacosa suggests substituting the juice of pressed garlic cloves for laser or laser root.  This may have been necessary in 1986 when her book was first published, in Italy.  But it isn’t necessary today for anyone with access to an Indian grocery store (either in their city or online).  Laser originally meant silphium, an aromatic plant that became extinct about 2000 years ago, but by the time the Apicius recipes were being written down, cooks were using asafoetida as a substitute.  You may not even need an Indian grocery to find asafoetida.  I have a bottle I purchased at Whole Foods.

Donald and I haven’t tried any recipes from The Classical Cookbook, but I’ve prepared several dishes from Cooking Apicius:  lamb faggots (the cookbook was published in Britain; the American translation of Giacosa’s cookbook uses the less unfortunate term “meat patties” for the Latin isicia), prawn (shrimp) balls in hydrogarum, toasted pine kernel sauce for roast wild boar or pork (I served it with pan-fried pork chops), offellae Ostian style, offellae Apician style (offellae are chunks of roasted or grilled pork belly), spring cabbage with cumin, parsnips in a cumin honey glaze, sauce for fried gourd (accompanied by fried gourd), and deep-fried honey fritters.  Everything has been quite good, the pork belly recipes in particular having been big hits at dinner parties or potlucks.  If anything, compared to Giacosa, Grainger has an excessively liberal hand with the spicing.  I think she puts in way too much cumin, in particular.  It may be that the cumin I buy is especially fresh and flavorful; or it may be that I just don’t like cumin as much as she does.  Her recipes have a lot of pepper, too, but, judging from our experience with conditum paradoxum, one of the few Apicius recipes to provide quantities, Romans liked their pepper.

Grainger doesn’t mess around with trying to substitute garlic for laser; she tells you to get yourself some asafoetida, as you should.  And, unlike both Grant and Giacosa, she acknowledges that the ancient Romans did not have zucchini or butternut squash (both New World vegetables unknown in Rome prior to the 16th century), and that Apician references to cucurbitas were to Old World gourds.  I used opo squash, which is often used today in Indian cooking.  It’s not that unlike zucchini, but if you’re trying for some degree of authenticity, you definitely shouldn’t be using any of the yellow or orange winter squashes.

So, I have to say, Sally Grainger wins the Roman cookbook prize.  Donald and I were so impressed with Cooking Apicius that we decided to purchase Grainger and Grocock’s complete English translation of the Apicius manual (“A Critical Edition with an Introduction and English Translation”), which has the Latin on one side, English on the facing page, and notes and appendices that take up more space than the actual text.

Cooking Apicius does call for ingredients that are not presently easy to find in the United States:  myrtle berries, lovage seed, date syrup, fresh rue and pennyroyal.  If you’re an experienced cook, you can probably figure out appropriate substitutions, or else stick to the recipes that don’t use them.  Lovage seed and rue are the most problematic, as Grainger uses them in so many of the recipes.  I did buy some rue seeds to try growing the fresh herb myself, but in the meantime I’ve been substituting some bitter fresh green–I’ve tried dandelion, and might also try arugula or fenugreek leaves (all of which the Romans would have had).  I’ve tried substituting either celery seed or ajwain seed for lovage, with good results.  Or you could buy lovage seeds intended for planting in your garden.  Make sure they’re organic, not treated with any fungicide or other toxic chemical.  You’ll probably have to pick out the seeds from the bits of twig and leaf, since planting seeds aren’t sorted as carefully as eating seeds.  (This is one of Donald’s tasks when I cook ancient Roman food.)  Also, while I’m confident enough that they’re safe to eat that I’ve fed dishes containing them to friends, they’re probably not really approved for human consumption, so eat them at your own risk.  On that same note, there’s some toxicity associated with rue and pennyroyal, although my reading on the subject suggests that the fresh herb is probably safe to eat.  Just don’t go making yourself herbal teas with the stuff unless you really know what you’re doing, and stay away from the extracts.  (There have been some accidental poisoning deaths from pennyroyal extract in particular.)

When you’re trying to re-enact a historical practice, whether cooking, costuming, or jousting, you always have to make choices about how authentic you’re going to be.  I’ve done all my ancient Roman cooking on my gas stove in my modern American kitchen, but if I wanted to be truly authentic, I’d have to build a reproduction clay oven in my backyard, or at least cook over charcoal in my Weber grill.  Then there are the ingredients.  I can decide to use goats’ milk instead of cows’ milk, and avoid New World ingredients.  But vegetables have changed in 2000 years.  The ancient Romans didn’t have bright orange carrots.  Theirs were white or pale yellow, more like parsnips.  It’s unclear which of the Brassica oleracea they meant by cymae and coliculi–various members of the cabbage family, and we know they didn’t have Brussels sprouts yet, but were they headed cabbages, or something more like kale or collard greens, or even broccoli?  I won’t even get into the whole issue of how wheat has changed over the millennia.

However, if you want a cookbook that strikes a good balance between historical authenticity and ease of preparation, with recipes that taste good, I recommend Sally Grainger’s Cooking Apicius.

*This is not entirely true.  One of the recipes in Cooking Apicius calls for “lamb stock (cube or fresh)”.  I’m willing to forgive Grainger here because lamb stock is a little harder to find than chicken or beef (though I’m not sure I’ve ever seen lamb Oxo cubes here in the US; it would probably be easier for me to buy some bony lamb pieces and make my own stock).  Grant calls for a chicken stock cube in at least one recipe in his cookbook.  That’s simply unacceptable, unless you live in, say, post-war Britain in the 50s.

It’s been over a month since my story “Clear Skies in Pixieland” came out in new e-journal Nine, and I’ve finally (a) finished reading the entire issue, and (b) found time to blog about it.  One of these days, maybe I’ll be more timely with these blog posts.  But there’s been more travelling and less time for writing than usual in my life this past month, and I try not to spend time on blog posts unless I’m also spending a reasonable amount of time writing fiction, so….

The nine stories in Issue 1 are a nicely diverse set:  contemporary fantasy (my story), science fiction, horror, magic realism, and historical fantasy all appear, ranging in length from flash fiction to novelette.  While I found every story interesting and compelling in some way (which is not the case with every magazine I read), my favorite was Garrett Ashley’s “The Last Letter, I’m Sorry You’ll Live Forever”, a science fictional take on the story of a son whose mother is immortal.

The lineup for Issue 2 of Nine was just announced, though no official word yet on when they’ll be publishing it.

I recently finished reading the first novel by new author Courtney Schafer:  The Whitefire Crossing.  It was one of the free books I got at last year’s World Fantasy convention in San Diego.  I definitely recommend it, if you enjoy epic fantasy.  The plot is tight and suspenseful, the main characters are interesting, and the secondary world in which the story takes place is one you want to learn more about.  The premise is that a young smuggler named Dev takes on a dangerous job, trying to smuggle a runaway apprentice mage into a neighboring country, while being pursued by the apprentice’s furious master.  It ends on a not-quite-cliffhanger, where there’s a pause in the action but it’s also clear that Dev’s story isn’t finished.  But the back cover of the book does warn that it’s “Book I of The Shattered Sigil“, so that’s okay.  I definitely want to read Book II, to find out what happens next.

While I did think the book was excellent, it did have a couple of flaws.  We’re told over and over (and over, and over) about Dev’s motivation for accepting such a dangerous assignment:  he needs the money to keep the daughter of his deceased mentor out of slavery.  But I thought this could have been shown more effectively, perhaps by drawing more parallels between the young girl in danger and Dev’s former lover, who was sold into slavery at a similar age (not in a creepy way; just in the sense of him not wanting the same thing to happen to his mentor’s daughter).  Also, the villains are cartoonishly evil, and I tend to prefer stories that explore the complexity of what makes someone evil (or good, or in-between).  But the characterization of the two protagonists (Dev, and the young apprentice Kiran) was complex and interesting enough that I could overlook those flaws, and the author used the alternating viewpoints very effectively to tell the two halves of the story.  As an author myself, I was definitely paying attention what Shafer was doing there; also to how skillfully she handed the unfolding of the plot and the building of dramatic tension.

The cover, by David Palumbo, is also excellent, and is one of the reasons I chose to read this book over the half dozen other new 2011 novels I got for free at World Fantasy.  Not just because it was pretty, but also because it signalled pretty clearly what sort of book this was, and all other things being equal I’ll usually choose the epic fantasy novel first.  But the fact that the cover was attractive and professional-looking certainly didn’t hurt, nor did the fact that the book was published by Night Shade Books, one of the best-reputed medium-sized publishers of fantasy.  (These are all things that I think about as I write my own novel, and listen to the debates about self-publishing vs. traditional publishing.)  Though on the other hand, a few years ago I read a free-from-World-Fantasy novel published by Penguin, with a cover by a much more famous artist, and that book was awful.  (I’m not going to say which book it was, since my motivation in discussing books on my blog is to recommend books that I think people should read, not slag other hardworking authors.)

It’s good to see epic fantasy being written by other women, too.  I don’t particularly seek out the work of other women writers; I read whatever interests me, no matter who wrote it.  But most of the big name authors in the field tend to be men, so it’s encouraging to see other women writing great fantasy novels and getting them published by major houses.

If you’re a writer, Courtney Shafer’s website also has some excellent, candid information about the process of finding an agent and getting published, so be sure to check that out!

My story “The Observation Deck” came out not too long ago in On Spec, “the Canadian magazine of the fantastic”, and I recently finished reading the issue that has my story in it (Fall 2011, though I didn’t receive it until 2012).  My favorite story in the magazine was Megan Fennell’s “Hexenhaus”, which picks up the story of Hansel and Gretel after they’ve defeated the witch.  I also liked a story by Scott H. Andrews (the editor of Beneath Ceaseless Skies), “The Halberdier, by Moonlight”.

The cover is very pretty, a sort of Asian-inspired steampunk illustration by featured artist James Ng.  There’s more of Ng’s art inside, also very cool, especially “Imperial Sheriff”.  Though I wondered if the originals of the interior pictures, reproduced in the magazine in black and white, are actually color paintings (like the cover), as they seemed quite dark, and often lacking in contrast.

On Spec tends to publish a pretty diverse selection of fiction:  this issue had more fantasy, but 3 of the 9 stories (including mine) could be considered science fiction (two futuristic, one steampunk).  The fantasy stories ranged from magic realism to high fantasy to historical fantasy.

The only negative note:  although they did get it right inside the magazine, my name is spelled wrong on the cover.

I recently finished reading my contributor’s copy of Aoife’s Kiss, which features my story “The Kiss of the Blood-Red Pomegranate”.  My favorite story was Rachel Zakuta’s “Memory of Snow”, an urban fantasy retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Snow Queen”.  I’ve always found “The Snow Queen” the most compelling of Andersen’s stories, and I thought Zakuta’s version worked both as an homage and as its own story, with Gerda having to rescue her younger brother from under the spell of their magically-gifted mother in Canada.

Aoife’s Kiss also published poetry.  I’m not sure I read enough poetry to be a good judge, but I loved V. Shirley Valencia’s poem “The Stray They Brought Inside”, printed on the back cover of the magazine.  It’s a beautifully written poem, the speculative element both subtle and integral to the piece.

I also enjoyed  ”Wolves”, by Laura DeHaan, a retelling of “Little Red Riding Hood” with a clever twist; and Chris Ward’s “Happy Shopping”, a satirical science fiction piece about the future of consumerism (you can read Chris Ward’s story and V. Shirley Valencia’s poem for free at the Aoife’s Kiss website).

I really like the diversity of fiction Aoife’s Kiss publishes, everything from steampunk to historical romantic fantasy, to hard science fiction.  They have great cover art, too, this month’s by April Bullard.

Aoife’s Kiss is also the only magazine that both Donald and I have appeared in, so far.  Donald’s story “A Stranger in the Library” appeared back in Issue 23, December 2007.

The magazine comes out in print four times a year, in March, June, September, and December.

I just finished reading The Empty Family, the new short story collection by Irish literary author Colm Toibin (apologies for the lack of accents; I’m not a sophisticated enough blogger to know if WordPress has a way of including accents in foreign words).  I try to not read just high fantasy, even though that’s what I like best, because I think that reading more broadly makes me a better writer (at least, I hope that it will).  Of course, this means that I don’t actually get around to reading most of the big high fantasy titles that come out each year.  But I think the trade-off is worth it.  I think when I just read the same sorts of stories all the time, I develop a terribly narrow view of what constitutes good fiction, and I like trying to learn what appeals to other readers in a book that I might not be quite as excited about as, say, the latest installment in A Song of Ice and Fire.

What I found most compelling about the stories in Toibin’s collection was his wonderful skill of characterization.  The individuals who populate these stories are all complex and vividly portrayed, sometimes less aware than the reader of what’s going on around them, sometimes self-deceptive, but always fascinating.  My favorite story was “The New Spain”, about a young woman returning home a few years after Franco’s death, after living in London for several years.  The family summer home on Menorca has changed in the years she’s been away, leading to conflicts with her parents and sister; but perhaps she also bears some of the blame for the changes that she loathes.  It’s a beautiful, slow-moving examination of coming home after enough years have passed to change both the traveler and the homeland.

I also really liked “The Colour of Shadows”, about a man caring for the dying aunt who raised him after he was abandoned by his mother, and “The Street”, about two Pakistani immigrant men in Barcelona and the relationship that develops between them.  I have a sense that the stories I liked best were the ones that, to me, seemed to have the most momentum, or plot, where I was intrigued because it felt that things were happening and I wanted to know what would happen next.  I think this is a genre reader/writer thing, and it seems to me that in literary fiction, it’s perfectly acceptable to write a story that is a close examination of a key moment in a character’s life, but in which (to a prejudiced genre reader) not a lot seems to happen.

It’s good to see what authors will do when they’re not working under the constraints that I’m used to.  I found the characterizations in Toibin’s collection much deeper and richer and also more subtle than I usually find in fantasy or science fiction short stories.  But I still liked best the stories where he brought this skill of characterization to a situation with more obvious conflict and momentum.

Continuing in the vein of finally getting around to reading magazines that have my stories in them, I recently finished Issue 10 of Mystic Signals.  At least I finished this one before the new issue was out!  Mystic Signals is a print compilation of all the stories that have appeared in the two most recent issues of online magazines Sorcerous Signals and The Lorelei Signal.  It’s available from Amazon, but you can also read it for free at the link above.

Each issue of Mystic Signals, a quarterly publication, features two “print-exclusive” stories in addition to the online content of the parent magazines, and my story “The Shoemaker’s Daughter” was one of these.  My favorite story in the issue I read was the other print-only story:  “The Exchange Box”, by Terry W. Ervin.  Sallie is a single mother on welfare who’s offered a chance at some quick, legal money.  All she has to do is place her hand into a mysterious box.  But each encounter with the box comes at a cost, and it’s not clear to Sallie whether the force connected to the box is generous or malevolent.  I liked how the box’s true nature remained ambiguous until the very end of the story; I didn’t know which way it was going to turn out.  And I also liked the compassionate but also realistic portrayal of how difficult it is even for intelligent, well-intentioned people to pull themselves out of poverty, even with a stroke of unnaturally good fortune.

I also liked Lauren LeBano’s “The Strawberry Banshee”, about an unpopular teenage girl and the dangerous creature she harbors; and “On the Reproductive Habits of Elves”, by Edward W. Robertson, an entertaining examination of why long-lived elves seem to have so few children, and whether everything about elven culture is all that it appears to be.

Issue 10 of Mystic Signals is still available, if you haven’t had a chance to check it out yet!

I finally finished reading the Spring 2011 issue of Strange, Weird, & Wonderful Magazine (in which my story “Sons of God, Daughters of Men” appears).  Of course, now the summer issue is out.*  Oh well.  What with getting laid off from my job and concentrating on writing-related pursuits full-time, I should be able to keep up better with all the fiction I want to read, in a more timely fashion.  (Donald says that there’s no way I’ll find time to do all the things I have planned for after I get laid off.)

My favorite story in the issue was Tom Greene’s “Turnover”.  Vivica has just started a new job as assistant to Mr. Perkins, an eccentric man who controls the office supply inventory at his workplace.  The story really shines in its characterization of Vivica, a woman for whom the ideal job is “entering inventories and distributions of supplies into long columns on preprinted forms, putting forms into color-coded envelopes that the boy from the mail room picked up, reconciling records of supplies in different departments.”  Also in its portrayal of the sinister Mr. Perkins, who hates to see any employee request anything more valuable than a stick of staples.  And what exactly does Mr. Perkins keep in the locked supply closet that Vivica has been forbidden to open?  Of course, it’s no surprise that Vivica does find an urgent reason to look in the mysterious supply closet, and that there’s more to Mr. Perkins than she originally thought; but the story adds enough interesting twists to this familiar trope that I found it a very compelling read.

* Even though the summer issue is out now, the spring issue is still available at the link above.

My story “Woman Moving to the Country” was published in Prairie Fire magazine at the beginning of this year, and I promised in my blog post announcing the publication that I would write about the other stories in the issue once I received my contributor’s copy. Well, um, they weren’t that slow in sending it. I just haven’t been able to make time before now. The first few months of this year were rather busy, for some reason.

Prairie Fire is a quarterly Canadian print literary magazine, publishing both short fiction and poetry (the issue I was in featured 6 stories, an essay, and 21 poems). I feel I should offer the disclaimer that I tend to write and read mostly genre, not literary, fiction; which means that I might be looking for different things in a story than the typical target reader of a literary journal such as Prairie Fire. So don’t assume I know what I’m talking about here!

For me, the most memorable stories were Colin Snowsell’s “The Driver” and Kirsten Madsen’s “The Cold Snap”. Snowsell’s story makes effective use of an unreliable narrator, and a twist ending that the reader sees coming soon enough to appreciate the poignancy of the situation, but not so soon that the twist feels too obvious. “The Cold Snap” is primarily about the narrator’s affair with an older married man (37 years old! Ancient!), but also about her relationships with the other people in her life. I appreciated how we see her assessment of other people change and deepen as she comes to know them better, particularly her younger coworker at the coffee shop, and her lover’s wife. I wasn’t convinced that the titular cold snap was an essential aspect of the story, though. Madsen’s descriptions of the frigid northern Canadian winter were richly descriptive, but I ended up feeling that the same story could just as well have been set in any small, remote town.

Interestingly, all the stories in the issue were written in first person. I don’t know if this is more typical of literary fiction, or just coincidence; in the fantasy and science fiction world, we certainly don’t avoid first person, but I’d say the majority of stories are told in third person, and in fact, some prominent f/sf editors actively dislike first person. Maybe the intimate nature of first person works better for the more internal sorts of stories that literary fiction tends to feature? (Or maybe I should read a few more literary magazines before venturing such a judgment.)

It’s even harder for me to judge poetry than literary fiction, since I read even less of it. And since I tend to be more interested in plot and character development than in imagery or beautiful language, I’m really out of my depth with poetry. Having said this, among the poems in the issue I particularly liked “Harry Mayzell’s Suit” by Harold Rhenisch (because it tells a story), Ellen Shearer’s “Hydrangea (after Plath)” (I found the imagery striking, and I liked the bitter edge), and R. Johnson’s “cat walk” (possibly because of its scorn for those who don’t love cats, and because it’s also the story of a relationship, in all its brevity).

Anne Simpson was the featured writer for this issue, with 4 poems and an essay. I loved the gorgeous use of nature imagery in her poems, and found her essay on “Poetry and Community” challenging and thought-provoking in its exploration (among other things) of how writers, whose work is so often inward-focused, also need to look outside themselves into the lives and experiences of others.

The next issue of Prairie Fire is out now, featuring, among others, poet Neile Graham, whom I know from the Clarion West Workshop. It would have been lovely to have been in the same issue as Neile, but alas, it was not to be! If you didn’t have a chance to read the issue with my story, and would still like to, back issues are orderable here. The one you’re looking for is Volume 31, Issue 4, featuring Anne Simpson.