Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 28

December 2012

8.5 x 7 · 60pp · January 2013 · Issue 28 · Available! Published! Excited! · Ebook available from Weightless.

Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet (a self-titled Occasional Outburst) returns either incredibly late for 2012 or incredibly early for 2014.

The latest issue of LCRW features magic, killing curses, broken lands and broken lands, a wandering octopus, a robot on the run, invisibility, neighbors, and The Book of Judgment.

What is not to love? Our cooking columnist Nicole Kimberling returns with advice on “Feeding Strays” and although we only managed one poem, it’s a good one.

Reviews

“Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet returns after taking 2012 off. The new issue is very good, with a set of stories that mostly push the SF/Fantasy envelope in engagingly strange directions. Kevin Waltman’s ‘‘Notes from a Pleasant Land Where Broken Hearts are Like Broken Hands’’ is, once decoded, a familiar enough dystopia, but the surface is strange enough to intrigue. It’s told by stolid Bolder, who thinks he lives in a utopia (because he’s been told so), until his attraction to Palmetto lures him astray. Amanda M. Pawley’s ‘‘Vanish Girl’’ is also dystopian SF, here featuring a girl with an invisible house, an invisible leg, a vicious roommate, and a state-supported addiction: again, it’s oddness that reveals itself to be somewhat familiar, but then in the end spirals strange again. My favorite story remains quite strange throughout: Krista Hoeppner Leahy’s ‘‘Killing Curses, a Caught-Heart Quest’’. This is about a curse-killer who marries a sort of walking tree, only to lose her over the question of how to raise their child – but we also have a Quixote who swears to save the hero from his death, and a Midas who isn’t sure if his curse is good or bad, and a dangerous plague. The language really sells the story in the way it reveals the strangeness of the setting.”
—Rich Horton, Locus

“Always happy to see a new issue of this occasional story outburst. I grope for a term to suggest the nature of the highly imaginative fiction here; “weird” will not do; “fabulist” is wrong; “odd” might fit, but I think I’ll settle on “strange”. Yes, these are strange stories, in which even experienced explorers of genre terrain may occasionally find themselves on uneven footing; there are few overworn trails here.”
—Lois Tilton, Locus Online

“The entire issue made me smile. I’m looking forward to the next issue, whenever it may come.”
—Fantasy Literature

“Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet is the kind of magazine that you want to read slowly. Read a story. Put the magazine down. Absorb what you have just read. Then, after a while, read another story. Repeat. After more than a year’s absence here is issue #28 with more of their very different stories.”
—SF Revu

Fiction

Michael Penkas, “Coffee with Count Presto”
Krista Hoeppner Leahy, “Killing Curses, a Caught-Heart Quest”
Kevin Waltman, “Notes from a Pleasant Land Where Broken Hearts Are Like Broken Hands”
Erica Hilderbrand, “Akashiyaki (Octopus Dumplings, serves two)”
Brian Baldi, “Springtime for the Roofer”
Andrea M. Pawley, “Vanish Girl”
Kamila Z. Miller, “Neighbors”
Helen Marshall, “The Book of Judgment”

Nonfiction

Nicole Kimberling, “Feeding Strays”
About the Authors

Poetry

John McKernan, “Prayer to Oatmeal”

Cover

Junyi Wu

Made by: Gavin J. Grant, Kelly Link, Jedediah Berry, and Michael J. DeLuca.

Readers: Su-Yee Lin, Samantha Guilbert, Cristi Jacques, Hannah Goldstein, Matthew Harrison, Molly Seeley, David Mitchell, Dustin Buchinski, Geoffrey Noble, Julie Day, Jennifer Terpsichore Abeles.

Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 28, January 2013. ISSN 1544-7782. Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61873-067-1.Text: Bodoni Book. Titles: Imprint MT Shadow. LCRW is usully published in June and November by Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., Easthampton, MA 01027 · smallbeerpress@gmail.com · smallbeerpress.com/lcrw. Subscriptions: $20/4 issues (see page 16 of the print issue for options). Please make checks to Small Beer Press. Library & institutional subscriptions are available through EBSCO & Swets.

LCRW is available as an ebook through weightlessbooks.com, &c. Contents © 2013 the authors. All rights reserved. Submissions, requests for guidelines, & all good things should be sent to the address above. No SASE: no reply. Paper edition printed by the good people at Paradise Copies, 21 Conz St., Northampton, MA 01060. 413-585-0414.

Apologies for the delay. The next issue will come sooner than you or I think. As ever, thank you for reading.

About These Authors

Brian Baldi’s writing has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Denver Quarterly, Fairy Tale Review, Invisible Ear, and elsewhere. He is fond of seltzer.

Erica Hildebrand has a soft spot in her heart for superheroes, dinosaurs, and the conquerors of antiquity. A graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop, her fiction has appeared in Bewere the Night, M-Brane SF, The Edge of Propinquity, and more. Her comics have appeared in Space Squid and Kaleidotrope. She lives in Pennsylvania.

Jenny Jerome was a Brooklyn girl who moved to London, married, had kids, published a literary journal, and had a fair amount of fun.

Krista Hoeppner Leahy is a writer and actor. She attended the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2007. Her work has appeared inShimmer, The Way of the Wizard, Writers of the Future, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn.

Kamila Zeman Miller lives with her family on small acreage in the Columbia River Gorge, where she paints and writes. She has the obligatory large number of rescued cats, as well as dogs, goats, chickens, and a very weird rabbit. If you meet her, be careful not to ask about her garden unless you’re a plant nerd with a patient ear.

Nicole Kimberling resides in Bellingham, Washington with her epically long-time partner, Dawn Kimberling, two bad cats and a rotating assortment of houseguests. Her first novel, Turnskin, won the Lambda Literary Award. Though currently the editor of Blind Eye Books, she has mostly made her money working as a professional cook.

Aurora-winning poet Helen Marshall is an author, editor, and self-proclaimed bibliophile. Her poetry and fiction have been published in ChiZine, Paper Crow, Abyss & Apex and Tesseracts among others. Her of poems have been collected in Skeleton Leaves and her short stories in Hair Side, Flesh Side. Currently, she is pursuing a Ph.D in medieval studies at the University of Toronto.

John McKernan—who grew up in Omaha Nebraska—is now retired after teaching 41 years at Marshall University. He lives—mostly—in West Virginia where he edits ABZ Press. His most recent book is a selected poems Resurrection of the Dust.  He has published poems in many places from The Atlantic Monthly to Zuzu’s Petals.

Andrea Pawley is a state of mind. No, make that several states of mind all going at once. Raised under curious circumstances, she now lives in the long shadow of the Washington Monument with a man and a plan, neither of which is perturbed by her nocturnal habits, her odd diet or her devotion to dead presidents. (Not money, actual dead presidents.)

Michael Penkas has lived in Chicago since 2004. He’s had a half-dozen short stories published, most recently in War of the Worlds: Frontlines.

Kevin Waltman has an MFA from the University of Alabama, and has published two young adult novels, Nowhere Fast and Learning the Game. He has also published short fiction with Six Bricks Press, Esquire.com, the Emerson Review, and the Connecticut Review. He lives in Coker, Alabama, with his wife Jessica and their magical dog Henry.

Junyi Wu is an illustrator from Los Angeles who likes pops of color, weathered textures, and pools of light, and likes to draw, arrange shapes, and be outdoors.