On Maureen F. McHugh

Mon 15 Feb 2016 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Maureen F. McHugh, Readercon| Posted by: Gavin

In honor of Maureen F. McHugh‘s birthday this month, here’s a piece I wrote for the 2013 Readercon handbook:

When I went to the Clarion Writers’ Workshop in East Lansing, Michigan, in the year 2000, Maureen F. McHugh was one of the anchor teachers. She and Greg Frost shook things up on the very first morning by politely and intelligently disagreeing with one another and they showed me — more than a hundred arguing reviewers, workshops, and bar discussions ever had — that stories will always be read differently.

I’ve since had the pleasure and honor of publishing two collections of Maureen’s own stories — which I have always thought compare well to the effect of a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster: “like having your brain smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a gold brick.”

Three ideas intersect at the heart of Maureen’s work: family, class, and technology. Family — biological, legal, chosen, or some other combination  —has always been one of Maureen’s main preoccupations. I don’t know if I have read a darker story than the title story of Maureen’s second collection, After the Apocalypse where she examines the mother-daughter bond and the individual’s will to survive. Many readers felt that it made Cormac McCarthy’s The Road seem cheerful.

Her story “Oversite,” published in Asimov’s in 2004 with it’s parental chip trackers and hackers is a cogent and painful analysis of a family.

Maureen’s obsessions all come together in stories such as “Honeymoon,” where a young woman cancels her honeymoon—and her wedding—when she finds her now-ex has gambled away their money. This woman, Kayla, dumps her useless ex but finds it hard to strike out on her own so she signs up to participate in medical studies, ignoring the possible side effects until they can’t be ignored any longer, and affecting her health, and others so this produce some Medical Negligence Solicitors against the investigators.

Maureen’s depictions of the normality of everyday life—people picking up second and third jobs or trying to monetize hobbies—is harrowing in places. Yet it is this unflinching gaze, this refusal to add explosions or go for the easy point but instead paint pictures of our everyday world, sometimes kicked a day or two in the future, are her strength.

In recent years, Maureen has been writing alternate reality games and screenplays for rides.tv and other websites. But I am happy to see that she is still writing short stories and one of these years, maybe she’ll surprise us all with a new novel.

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Free LCRW Ebook Subscriptions

Fri 12 Feb 2016 - Filed under: Not a Journal., DRM-free, Free books, LCRW, Weightless Books| Posted by: Gavin

We’re celebrating moving to our new webhost, Dreamhost, with a special that will run all month:

Buy any ebook on our lovely DRM-free indie ebookstore WeightlessBooks.com between 12 a.m. February 1 and 11:59 p.m. February 29(!) 2016 and receive a free 4-issue LCRW subscription (worth $9.95!). If you’re already a subscriber, you will receive a 4-issue subscription extension. And if you buy an LCRW subscription, this will basically double it, but this offer applies to any ebook bought from this store this month.

(If you’d rather not receive this bonus, please email us, thank you.) The bonus LCRW subscription will be added to your Library in the first week of March.

Why? We had an awful experience at the end of the year when our previous webhost dropped all our sites for a whole week. When we asked about back ups, they said the back ups were in the same place as the actual site . . . and could not be reached. Which means they were nonfunctioning backups. Not impressive.

So now we have signed with Dreamhost who promise 99.9% or higher(!) levels of uptime and it is time to celebrate and thank all the readers who choose Weightless!

Here are some Small Beer bestsellers as a place to start:

1. Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet Subscription(!)
2. After the Apocalypse, Maureen F. McHugh
3. A Stranger in Olondria, Sofia Samatar
4. Redemption in Indigo, Karen Lord
5. Travel Light, Naomi Mitchison
6. North American Lake Monsters: Stories, Nathan Ballingrud
7. At the Mouth of the River of Bees, Kij Johnson
8. Solitaire: a novel, Kelley Eskridge
9. What I Didn’t See and Other Stories, Karen Joy Fowler
10. Storyteller: Writing Lessons and More from 27 Years of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, Kate Wilhelm

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The Chemical Wedding moves to

Thu 11 Feb 2016 - Filed under: Not a Journal., John Crowley, The Chemical Wedding| Posted by: Gavin

Final typesetting after a second round of proofing. Jacob McMurray has designed a beautiful book, including using a suitably fabulous illustration by Theo Fadel for the cover. We should have the Kickstarter going in a couple of months and then a 400th anniversary trade paperback(!) edition available this autumn. Details will be here and here.

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Joan Aiken giveaway

Thu 4 Feb 2016 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Freebies, Joan Aiken| Posted by: Gavin

No, we don’t have Joan Aikens to give out, but we are giving away 5 advance copies of The People in the Castle: Selected Strange Stories on Goodreads!

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Networking the not a journal

Tue 2 Feb 2016 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

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Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin

Mon 1 Feb 2016 - Filed under: Not a Journal., kickstarter, Ursula K. Le Guin| Posted by: Gavin

Hope you will consider backing this if you can!

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New LCRW coming

Wed 27 Jan 2016 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Ayize Jama-Everett, LCRW, Mary Rickert, Sofia Samatar| Posted by: Gavin

It’s been all audio video with Ayize Jama-Everett‘s fab BCAF interview, Sofia Samatar’s SF Signal podcast interview, and Julie Day’s podcast of Mary Rickert’s “Cold Fires.”

So next month we’ll try and take it back to where it all began: the zine, in print!

I’ll post the table of contents soonish. The cover is by none other than Kathleen Jennings. There are excellent stories. There will not be blood. There will be poetry. There will not be political posturing. Wait, there may be. We may misspell the acronym: LCWR, CLWR, MEHH, WHUT, LWRW, WWLCD? (She’d marry another younger man, start a fannncy lit mag, join a hospital ship, get a tattoo, have some fun.)

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Small Beer Podcast 21: Mary Rickert’s “Cold Fires”

Wed 20 Jan 2016 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Cold Fires, Julie C. Day, Julie Day, Mary Rickert, Podcastery, small beer podcast, You Have Never Been Here| Posted by: Julie

Being the internet age, I’ve learned as much about Mary Rickert from her Facebook feed as I have from the biography on her website.

These are the facts I am confident are true: Mary Rickert dislikes the Distraction Culture of smartphones and loves flowers, she is open to new adventures and has spent many hours hiking the Sequoia National Park, she is generous and gracious and deeply appreciative of her friends.

As this is also the Fragmentary Age, I also “know” some facts that are likely some percentage of wrong: she is a serious practitioner of yoga, she spent years working and reworking her critically-acclaimed first novel, she has a dog.

Finally, there are the facts I gleaned from her writing itself. No external proof is required; her stories are the proof. Mary Rickert sees the darkness inside all of us and still cares. She loves children, real children, the kind who are selfish and volatile and loving and oh-so vulnerable. She understands that people often fail to be their best selves. Mary Rickert doesn’t flinch. That’s what makes her fiction so powerful. But beneath the disquiet and darkness, or intertwined with it, her stories contain an intense belief in the redemptive power of human caring. Her stories are immersive and beautiful and full small human kindnesses.

The story I chose for this podcast, “Cold Fires,” is about pirates, and strawberries, and enchantments, including the enchantment of love. It is also about what happens when people love too much and what happens when they fail to love enough.

Mary Rickert earned a MFA from Vermont College of Fine Art.  Her novel, The Memory Garden, won the Locus award for best first novel and won rave reviews from such places as io9, NPR, and Publishers Weekly. Her stories have won or been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, the Nebula, the Crawford Award, and the International Horror Guild Award.

Episode 21: In which Julie C. Day reads Mary Rickert’s “Cold Fires” from her collection You Have Never Been Here.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe to the Small Beer podcast using  iTunes or the service of your choice:

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2016 Best Fiction for Young Adults

Wed 13 Jan 2016 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Nicole Kornher-Stace| Posted by: Gavin

There’s a huge list of Best Fiction for Young Adults here and it includes Nicole Kornher-Stace’s Archivist Wasp. Yeah! Go librarians!

How is this book doing? The second printing is flying out so we’d better start working on the next printing (such happy words). But how will we fit all this on the cover??

Kirkus Reviews: Best Teen Books of 2015
Book Riot: Best of 2015
Buzzfeed: 32 Best Fantasy Novels of 2015
ABC Best Books for Young Readers Catalog
Flavorwire: The 10 Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Novels of 2015 So Far
LA Times Summer Reading
Locus Recommended Reading

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Interview on Ploughshares

Tue 5 Jan 2016 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Interviews| Posted by: Gavin

Those lovely people who turned all their swords into ploughs interviewed Kelly and me. Read all about it here.

 

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A . . . website?

Sun 3 Jan 2016 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

We’ve just spent a week or more with no website. It was surreal! Anyway, hello 2016!

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