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The Museum of All Things Awesome and That Go Boom

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About this book:

Edited by Joanne Merriam, The Museum of All Things Awesome and That Go Boom is an anthology of science fiction featuring blunt force trauma, explosions, adventure, derring-do, tigers, Martians, zombies, fanged monsters, dinosaurs (alien and domestic), ray guns, rocket ships, and anthropomorphized marshmallows.

The anthology contains work by 40 authors: fiction by Jim Comer, James Dorr, Aidan Doyle, Tom Doyle, Kendra Fortmeyer, Nick Kocz, David Kopaska-Merkel, Ken Liu, Kelly Luce, Tim Major, Laurent McAllister, Sequoia Nagamatsu, Jerry Oltion, Ursula Pflug, Leonard Richardson, Erica L. Satifka, G. A. Semones, Matthew Sanborn Smith, Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, Lucy Sussex, Mary A. Turzillo, Nick Wood, and K. Ceres Wright, and poetry by Khadija Anderson, Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, Kristin Bock, Alicia Cole, Estíbaliz Espinosa (translated by Neil Anderson), Miriam Bird Greenberg, Benjamin Grossberg, Julie Bloss Kelsey, Katie Manning, Martha McCollough, Marc McKee, Richard King Perkins II, Christina Sng, J. J. Steinfeld, Sonya Taaffe, Deborah Walker, and Ali Znaidi.

The actual Museum of All Things Awesome and that Go Boom is housed in the half-kiloSmoot-square, two-centuries-old dancing building, the Old Ptolemy, in the city of Draconis on the planet Epsilon Eridani b.

Table of Contents:

  • Khadija Anderson, “Observational Couplets upon returning to Los Angeles from Outer Space”
  • Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, “Photograph of a Secret”
  • Kristin Bock, “I Wish I Could Write a Poem about Pole-Vaulting Robots”
  • Alicia Cole, “Asteroid Orphan”
  • Jim Comer, “Soldier’s Coat”
  • James Dorr, “Bubba Claus Conquers the Martians”
  • Aidan Doyle, “Mr. Nine and the Gentleman Ghost”
  • Tom Doyle, “Crossing Borders”
  • Estíbaliz Espinosa, “Dissidence” (translated by Neil Anderson)
  • Kendra Fortmeyer, “Squaline”
  • Miriam Bird Greenberg, “Brazilian Telephone”
  • Benjamin Grossberg, “The Space Traveler and Runaway Stars”
  • Julie Bloss Kelsey, two scifaiku
  • Nick Kocz, “The Last American Tiger”
  • David Kopaska-Merkel, “Captain Marshmallow”
  • Ken Liu, “Nova Verba, Mundus Novus”
  • Kelly Luce, “Ideal Head of a Woman”
  • Tim Major, “Read/Write Head”
  • Katie Manning, “Baba Yaga’s Answer”
  • Laurent McAllister, “Kapuzine and the Wolf: A Hortatory Tale”
  • Martha McCollough, “valley of the talking dolls” and “adventures of cartoon bee”
  • Marc McKee, “A Moment in Fill-In-The-Blank City”
  • Sequoia Nagamatsu, “Headwater LLC”
  • Jerry Oltion, “A Star Is Born”
  • Richard King Perkins II, “The Sleeper’s Requiem”
  • Ursula Pflug, “Airport Shoes”
  • Leonard Richardson, “Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs”
  • Erica L. Satifka, “Thirty-Six Questions Propounded by the Human-Powered Plasma Bomb in the Moments Before Her Imminent Detonation”
  • G. A. Semones, “Never Forget Some Things”
  • Matthew Sanborn Smith, “The Empire State Building Strikes Back!”
  • Christina Sng, “Medusa in LA”
  • J. J. Steinfeld, “The Loudest Sound Imaginable”
  • Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, “The Wanderers”
  • Lucy Sussex, “A Sentimental, Sordid Education”
  • Sonya Taaffe, “And Black Unfathomable Lakes”
  • Mary Turzillo, “Pride”
  • Deborah Walker, “Sea Monkey Mermaid”
  • Nick Wood, “The Girl Who Called the World”
  • K. Ceres Wright, “The Haunting of M117”
  • Ali Znaidi, “A Dolphin Scene” and “Australian Horoscope”

About the Contributors:

Butoh dancer, Muslim convert, and Pushcart nominated poet Khadija Anderson has been published extensively in print and online. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University LA and her first book of poetry History of Butoh was published in 2012 through Writ Large Press. Find her at khadijaanderson.com.

Neil Anderson is a translator and teacher living in Lubbock, Texas. His translations from Galician have been published in Asymptote, The Bitter Oleander, Shearsman, Absinthe, M-Dash, and elsewhere.

Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is the 2013 Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange poetry winner. She has work published in American Poetry Review, CALYX, and Acentos Review among others. A short dramatization of her poem “Our Lady of the Water Gallons,” directed by Chicano activist and Hollywood director, Jesús Salvador Treviño can be viewed at latinopia.com. She curates the quarterly reading series HITCHED and co-founded Women Who Submit. Her debut poetry collection, Built with Safe Spaces, is forthcoming from Sundress Publications.

Kristin Bock holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts—Amherst where she currently teaches. Her poems have appeared in many literary magazines and journals, including VERSE, Columbia, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, The Black Warrior Review, and FENCE, as well as the URB anthology Apocalypse Now: Poems & Prose from the End of Days. She lives with her husband, artist Geoffrey Kostecki, in Montague, Massachusetts where they refurbish liturgical art. She is also a contributing editor to the literary magazine, Bateau. Bock’s debut collection of poetry, Cloisters, won Tupelo Press’s First Book Award and the da Vinci Eye Award.

Alicia Cole is a recent New Orleanian transplant by way of Atlanta, GA. She’s a professional writer, editor, and artist. Her sci-fi serial Blinded is currently being published by Rainbow Rumpus, and her work has recently appeared on PodCastle, and been reviewed in Dead Reckonings. You can find more of her work at www.facebook.com/AliciaColewriter and https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6470571.Alicia_Cole.

Jim Comer is an author and teacher who lives in Arkansas.

Indiana writer James Dorr‘s The Tears of Isis was a 2014 Bram Stoker Award nominee for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection. Other books include Strange Mistresses: Tales of Wonder and Romance, Darker Loves: Tales of Mystery and Regret, and his all-poetry Vamps (A Retrospective). For more, visit Dorr’s blog at jamesdorrwriter.wordpress.com.

Aidan Doyle is an Australian writer and computer programmer. He has visited more than 90 countries and his experiences include teaching English in Japan, interviewing ninjas in Bolivia and going ten-pin bowling in North Korea. Find him at aidandoyle.net and @aidan_doyle.

In 2014, Tor Books published American Craftsmen, Tom Doyle‘s first novel in a three-book deal. The Left-Hand Way followed in 2015. He is a winner of the WSFA Small Press Award and a Writers of the Future Award. His short fiction has appeared in Aeon, Buzzy Mag, Daily Science Fiction, Futurismic, and the URB anthology How to Live on Other Planets: A Handbook for Aspiring Aliens. Paper Golem has published his short story collection, The Wizard of Macatawa and Other Stories.

Estíbaliz Espinosa is a Spanish- and Galician-language writer, author of the books Pan (libro de ler e desler) (2000); -orama (2002); Número e (2004); zoommm. textos biónicos (2007); and Curiosidade (2015). Find her at estibalizes.wordpress.com.

Kendra Fortmeyer received her MFA in fiction from UT Austin, and is the fiction editor for Broad! magazine. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in PANK, NANO Fiction, Forge, apt, Juked, Fiddleblack (under pen name Zoe Abramson), Corium and elsewhere.

Miriam Bird Greenberg is the author of the chapbooks All night in the new country and Pact-Blood, Fever Grass, and her work has been awarded fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the NEA. She lives in Berkeley and teaches ESL.

Benjamin S. Grossberg is Director of Creative Writing at The University of Hartford. His most recent book of poems, Space Traveler, was published by the University of Tampa Press in spring of 2014. His earlier collections include Sweet Core Orchard (University of Tampa, 2009), winner of the 2008 Tampa Review Prize and a Lambda Literary Award.

Julie Bloss Kelsey writes speculative poetry and short stories from her home in suburban Maryland. Her work has been published in Scifaikuest, Seven by Twenty, Eye to the Telescope, Star*Line, and Mad Scientist Journal, among others. She is currently writing a scifaiku chapbook about an ill-fated alien romance. Visit her on Twitter @MamaJoules.

Nick Kocz‘s stories and essays have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Entropy, Five Chapters, Mid-American Review, and The Nervous Breakdown. He has an MFA from Virginia Tech and is the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Virginia Tech. He lives in Blacksburg, VA with his wife and three children.

An aether compactor by trade, David C. Kopaska-Merkel began writing poetry after witnessing the Ascension of Tim. He won the Rhysling award for best long poem in 2006 for a collaboration with Kendall Evans. He has written 23 books, of which one of the latest is SETI Hits Paydirt (Popcorn Press, 2014). Kopaska-Merkel has edited Dreams & Nightmares since 1986.

Ken Liu is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts. Saga Press, Simon & Schuster’s new genre fiction imprint, published his debut novel, The Grace of Kings, in 2015, and will publish a collection of his short stories, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, in 2016.

Kelly Luce‘s story collection, Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail, won the 2013 Foreword Review‘s Editors Choice Prize in Fiction. Her debut novel, Pull Me Under, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2016. A Contributing Editor for Electric Literature, she hails from Illinois and lives in Santa Cruz, California.

Tim Major lives in Oxford with his wife and son. His time-travel novel, You Don’t Belong Here, will be published by Snowbooks in September 2016 and his horror novella, Carus & Mitch, was published by Omnium Gatherum in February 2015. His short stories have featured in Interzone, Perihelion, Every Day Fiction, and numerous anthologies. He is the Editor of the SF magazine, The Singularity, and also blogs at cosycatastrophes.wordpress.com.

Katie Manning is the author of three poetry chapbooks, including The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman. She has received The Nassau Review Author Award for Poetry, and her writing has been published in Fairy Tale Review, New Letters, PANK, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. She is the founding Editor-in-Chief of Whale Road Review, and she is an Assistant Professor of Writing at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. Find her online at katiemanningpoet.com.

Laurent McAllister is the symbionym of a duo of Canadian writers, Yves Meynard and Jean-Louis Trudel. Since 1984, they have published extensively in French and in English, penning under the McAllister identity one award-winning novel, Suprématie (2009), one collection, three young adult books, and several short stories. Writing separately, they have authored nearly 40 books, and many more short stories. Tor published Meynard’s fantasy novel Chrysanthe in 2012. Trudel’s short story “The Snows of Yesteryear” was included in the John Joseph Adams anthology Loosed Upon the World from Saga in 2015.

Martha McCollough is an artist and writer who lives in Chelsea, Massachusetts. Her videopoems have been exhibited at festivals and conferences internationally, and have appeared in Rattapallax, Gone Lawn, and TriQuarterly. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Small Po[r]tions, Cream City Review, and Salamander.

Marc McKee received an MFA from the University of Houston and a PhD from the University of Missouri at Columbia, where he lives with his wife, Camellia Cosgray. His work has appeared in several journals, among them Barn Owl Review, Boston Review, Cimarron Review, Conduit, Crazyhorse, DIAGRAM, Forklift, Ohio, LIT, and Pleiades. He is the author of the chapbook What Apocalypse?, which won the New Michigan Press/DIAGRAM 2008 Chapbook Contest, and two full-length collections, Fuse (Black Lawrence Press, 2011) and Bewilderness (Black Lawrence Press, 2014).

Sequoia Nagamatsu is the author of the Japanese folklore inspired story collection, Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone (Black Lawrence Press). His work has appeared in journals such as Conjunctions, Lightspeed Magazine, Zyzzyva, The Fairy Tale Review, Tin House online, and Black Warrior Review. He is the managing editor of Psychopomp Magazine and an assistant professor of creative writing at St. Olaf College in Minnesota. More info at http://sequoianagamatsu.net.

Jerry Oltion has had over 150 short stories and 15 novels published over the last 30 years, and is still hard at it. He has become the most frequently published author in the history of Analog magazine, and has won the Nebula Award for his novella, “Abandon in Place.” He is mostly known for hard science fiction with a human, often humorous touch.

Richard King Perkins II is a state-sponsored advocate for residents in long-term care facilities. He has a wife, Vickie and a daughter, Sage. He is a three-time Pushcart nominee and a Best of the Net nominee whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in hundreds of publications including Bluestem, December Magazine, Emrys Journal, Poetry Salzburg Review, Roanoke Review, Sierra Nevada Review, The Louisiana Review, The Red Cedar Review, The William and Mary Review, and Two Thirds North.

Ursula Pflug is the critically acclaimed author of the novels Green Music (Edge/Tesseract), The Alphabet Stones (Blue Denim) and Motion Sickness (Inanna; illustrated by S.K. Dyment). She penned the story collections After the Fires (Tightrope) and Harvesting the Moon (PS). She edited the anthologies They Have To Take You In (Hidden Brook) and Playground of Lost Toys (Exile; with Colleen Anderson.) A YA novella, Mountain, is forthcoming from Inanna. She teaches creative writing workshops at Loyalist College, Trent University (with Derek Newman-Stille) and elsewhere. She has collaborated with filmmakers, dancers, and installation artists and her short fiction has been taught at universities in Canada and India. Find her at ursulapflug.ca.

Leonard Richardson became a programmer because paleontology involved too much outdoor work. He writes prose and open source software from his home in New York. For more about him, go to www.crummy.com.

Erica L. Satifka‘s fiction has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and Shimmer as well as URB’s anthology How to Live on Other Planets.

Weaned on fairy tales and hero adventures, G. A. Semones remembers reading his first space opera when about nine years old. He began writing in his teens and writes primarily fantasy and science fiction. He is a Liberty Hall Writers denizen. A software engineer, he has built scary things that self-heal and self-organize. He is a devoted husband, dad and granddad who, when not writing, enjoys history, antique cryptography, fossils, reading, and gardening with his wife. His work has appeared on The Drabblecast, Ray Gun Revival, and Alternate Hilarities, among others.

Matthew Sanborn Smith is a South Floridian speculative fiction author whose fiction has appeared at Tor.com, Nature, Chizine, and Diabolical Plots among others. He is an occasional contributor to the StarShipSofa, SF Signal, and SFF Audio podcasts. His collection, The Dritty Doesen: Some of the Least Reasonable Stories of Matthew Sanborn Smith, is waiting patiently for just the right reader, and his podcast, Beware the Hairy Mango, is adored by dozens.

Christina Sng is a Rhysling-nominated poet, writer, and artist. Her work has received several Honorable Mentions in the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. She is the author of three chapbooks and her first full-length book of poetry, A Collection of Nightmares from Raw Dog Screaming Press arrives late 2016. Visit her online at christinasng.com.

Canadian J. J. Steinfeld lives on Prince Edward Island, where he is patiently waiting for Godot’s arrival and a phone call from Kafka. While waiting, he has published sixteen books, including the short story collections Disturbing Identities (Ekstasis Editions), Should the Word Hell Be Capitalized? (Gaspereau Press), Would You Hide Me? (Gaspereau Press), A Glass Shard and Memory (Recliner Books), and Madhouses in Heaven, Castles in Hell (Ekstasis Editions), the novels Our Hero in the Cradle of Confederation (Pottersfield Press) and Word Burials (Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink), and the poetry collections An Affection for Precipices (Serengeti Press), Misshapenness (Ekstasis Editions), and Identity Dreams and Memory Sounds (Ekstasis Editions). His short stories and poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and periodicals internationally, and over forty of his one-act plays and a handful of full-length plays have been performed in Canada and the United States.

Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam lives in Texas with her partner and two literarily-named cats: Gimli and Don Quixote. Her work has appeared in magazines such as Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and Interzone. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program and curates an annual Art & Words Show, profiled in Poets & Writers. Bonnie is represented by Ann Collette at Rees Literary. You can visit her on Twitter @BonnieJoStuffle or through her website: www.bonniejostufflebeam.com.

Lucy Sussex was born in New Zealand. She has edited four anthologies, including She’s Fantastical (1995), shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award. Her award-winning fiction includes books for younger readers and the novel The Scarlet Rider. She has five short story collections, My Lady Tongue, A Tour Guide in Utopia, Absolute Uncertainty, Matilda Told Such Dreadful Lies (a best of), and Thief of Lives. Her latest project is Blockbuster!: Fergus Hume and the Mystery of a Hansom Cab.

Sonya Taaffe‘s short fiction and poetry can be found in the collections Ghost Signs (Aqueduct Press), A Mayse-Bikhl (Papaveria Press), Postcards from the Province of Hyphens (Prime Books), and Singing Innocence and Experience (Prime Books), and in various anthologies including The Humanity of Monsters, Genius Loci: Tales of the Spirit of Place, and Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror. She is currently senior poetry editor at Strange Horizons; she holds master’s degrees in Classics from Brandeis and Yale and once named a Kuiper belt object. She lives in Somerville with her husband and two cats.

Mary Turzillo‘s 1999 Nebula-winner, “Mars Is no Place for Children” and Analog novel An Old-Fashioned Martian Girl are recommended reading on the International Space Station. Her poetry collection Lovers & Killers won the 2013 Elgin Award for Best Collection, and she has been a finalist on the British SFA, Pushcart, Stoker, Dwarf Stars and Rhysling ballots. Sweet Poison, her collaboration with Marge Simon, came out from Dark Renaissance in 2014. She lives in Berea, Ohio, with her scientist-writer husband, Geoffrey A. Landis.

Deborah Walker grew up in the most English town in the country, but she soon high-tailed it down to London, where she now lives with her partner, Chris, and her two young children. Find Deborah in the British Museum trawling the past for future inspiration or on her blog, deborahwalkersbibliography.blogspot.com. Her poems have appeared in Dreams & Nightmares, Star*Line, and Enchanted Conversation.

Nick Wood is a South African clinical psychologist, with around twenty short stories previously published in Interzone, Infinity Plus, AfroSF, PostScripts, Redstone Science Fiction, Fierce Family, and How to Live On Other Planets, amongst others. His YA speculative fiction novella The stone chameleon was published in South Africa and his debut novel Azanian Bridges is due to be published in the UK in 2016 by NewCon Press. He has completed an MA in Creative Writing (SF & Fantasy) through Middlesex University, London and is currently training clinical psychologists in London, England. He can be found at @nick45wood or nickwood.frogwrite.co.nz.

K. Ceres Wright received her Master’s degree in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University in Greensburg, PA, and Cog was her thesis novel for the program. Wright’s science fiction poem, “Doomed,” was a nominee for the Rhysling Award, the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s highest honor. Her work has appeared in Diner Stories, Hazard Yet Forward, Genesis: An Anthology of Black Science Fiction, The 2008 Rhysling Anthology, Far Worlds, The Dark God’s Gift, and Many Genres, One Craft. Find her at www.kcereswright.com or on Twitter @KCeresWright.

Ali Znaidi lives in Redeyef, Tunisia, where he teaches English. He authored four poetry chapbooks including Experimental Ruminations (Fowlpox Press, 2012), Moon’s Cloth Embroidered with Poems (Origami Poems Project, 2012), Bye, Donna Summer! (Fowlpox Press, 2014), and Taste of the Edge (Kind of a Hurricane Press, 2014). You can see more of his work on his blog at aliznaidi.blogspot.com.

About the Editor

Joanne Merriam is the owner and publisher of Upper Rubber Boot Books. She was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada and lived thereabouts for her first three decades. In 2001, she quit her job as the Executive Assistant of the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia to travel Canada by train, and then parts of the Northeastern and Southern United States. Her first book of poetry, The Glaze from Breaking, was written, in part, about those travels. In 2004, she immigrated to the USA, where she has lived in Kentucky and New Hampshire, and now resides in Nashville, Tennessee.

Joanne Merriam’s poetry and fiction has appeared in dozens of magazines and journals, including The Antigonish Review, Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Fiddlehead, The Furnace Review, Grain, The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, The Mainichi Daily News, Per Contra, Riddle Fence, Room of One’s Own, Strange Horizons and Vallum Contemporary Poetry, as well as in the anthologies Ice: new writing on hockey, To Find Us: Words and Images of Halifax and The Allotment: New Lyric Poets. She most recently edited How to Live on Other Planets: A Handbook for Aspiring Aliens and co-edited Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good with H. L. Nelson. Visit her at www.joannemerriam.com.

Reviews:

26 July 2016

Small Press Week Round-up 2017

Oh my, have we had a week! When I founded Small Press Week last year, I didn’t expect it to catch on so big, so soon. Last year, participants included Alice James Press, Book Smugglers, Brick Mantel, Canadian Scholars, Carolina Wren, Comma, Dead Ink, Forest Avenue, Gold Line, Guardbridge, Headmistress, Hix Eros, ink & locket, Kamaria, Linen, Ninja Book Box, Open Books, Propriometrics, Red Hen, Sarabande, Shade Mountain, Steerforth, World Weaver, and Yali Books. This year, we’ve had even more!

Below, a small sample of the richness:

 

Sunday November 19 (#SPWtips)

 

Monday November 20 (#SPWpast)

 

Tuesday November 21 (#SPWpresent)

 

Wednesday November 22 (#SPWfuture)

 

Thursday November 23 (#SPWzoom)

 

Friday November 24 (#SPWreads)

 

Saturday November 25 (#SPWshop)

25 November 2017

Small Press Week #SPWzoom

Today for Small Press Week we’re zooming in on 2016 releases. Upper Rubber Boot has two releases this year: The Museum of All Things Awesome And That Go Boom, an anthology of derring-do, explosions and blunt force trauma, and Floodgate Poetry Series Vol. 3, comprised of a short poetry book by Enid Shomer, another co-written by Cave Canem fellows F. Douglas Brown and Geffrey Davis, and a third co-written by brothers Anders and Kai Carlson-Wee. We thought we’d have some fun with this and just tantalize you with some snippets:

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Previous URB Small Press Week posts:

1 comment 22 November 2016

Small Press Week #SPWpast

It’s Small Press Week! Today we’re talking about the history of our press.

I’m Joanne Merriam, the Publisher of Upper Rubber Boot. I had toyed with the idea of starting a press for over a decade, since my days as a staffer at the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia, where I was one of two staff, doing everything the Executive Director didn’t do (essentially running the office and our programming, and helping our members and the public understand submission etiquette and industry standards). Working there both made me feel like running a publishing company was a possibility, and gave me a great primer on much of what I needed to know.

After I immigrated to the United States, I was having trouble connecting with other professional writers, mostly because I was mired in poverty and couldn’t attend workshops or the like. I met Molly Peacock at a reading, and she suggested that I start something that made writers come to me, like she had started The Best Canadian Poetry in English series.

I started URB in 2011. I ran a very modest kickstarter which gave me the funds to buy 100 ISBNs, and spent my two-week Christmas break releasing and promoting Heather Kamins’ Blueshifting and 140 And Counting: an anthology of writing from 7×20.

In early 2012, Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum approached me about an apocalyptic anthology, which became Apocalypse Now: Poems & Prose from the End of Days, containing stories by Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, and Pinckney Benedict. I started to feel “real” at that point!

Andrew has stayed on as an acquisitions editor for the Floodgate Poetry Series, which annually releases three chapbooks (short poetry books) in one volume. He is also co-editing the forthcoming Warning! Poems May Be Longer Than They Appear.

After the success of Apocalypse Now, URB has released a number of anthologies of speculative fiction: Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good, How to Live on Other Planets: A Handbook for Aspiring Aliens, and The Museum of All Things Awesome and That Go Boom.

We’ve also released single-author books of poetry by Peg Duthie (Measured Extravagance), T. D. Ingram (Hiss of Leaves), Lyn Lifshin (Marilyn Monroe: Poems), Corey Mesler (The Sky Needs More Work), of fiction by RJ Astruc (Signs Over the Pacific and Other Stories), Sergey Gerasimov (The Mask Game), and most recently by Argentine author Teresa P. Mira de Echeverría and translated into English by Lawrence Schimel (Memory: A Novelette).

I feel tremendously fortunate to get to work with talented writers on books that are important, that talk about vital things, and that challenge readers to think and act!

 

Previous URB Small Press Week posts:

21 November 2016

Museum Goodreads Book Giveaway

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Museum of All Things Awesome and that Go Boom by Joanne Merriam

The Museum of All Things Awesome and that Go Boom

by Joanne Merriam

Giveaway ends July 31, 2016.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

23 July 2016

Open call for submissions for Museum anthology

Announcing an open call for reprint submissions for our upcoming anthology of fiction and poetry, The Museum of All Things Awesome And That Go Boom, to be published in 2016 by Upper Rubber Boot Books.

Editor Joanne Merriam is interested in explosions, adventure, derring-do, swashbuckling, dinosaurs, ray guns, von Neumann machines, fanged monsters, flame-throwing killer robots, chainsaws, antimatter, and blunt force trauma.

She is also interested in writing which explodes our perspective of science fiction itself—literary fiction employing SF tropes, cyberpunk, speculative fiction, magical realism, infernokrusher, etc., are all welcome.

  • Word/page count: Up to 10,000 words/story or up to 100 lines/poem.
  • Payment: Pro-rated share of 30% royalty for ebook sales and 10% royalty of print book sales; pro-rata share to be based upon page count in the print edition.
  • Publication history: Must be previously published, unless it’s a translation, in which case the original must have been published in its original language. Non-exclusive reprint rights must be available (but it’s fine if the work is still available to readers online). Unpublished works may be submitted by invitation only.
  • Multiple submissions: Up to 3 stories or 5 poems.
  • Simultaneous submissions: Since we will be asking for non-exclusive rights, this is fine as long as the other market is also non-exclusive; please note that this means we will expect you not to withdraw a submission because it has been accepted elsewhere.
  • Deadline: 4 January 2015.
  • To submit: Send to joanne at upperrubberboot dot com:
    (a) your complete manuscript as a .RTF,
    (b) a bio of 100 words or fewer, and
    (c) a listing of previous publication credit(s) for the work.
    Put “Museum SF” in the subject line.
    If the work is a translation, please also provide a statement from the rightsholder that you are authorized to translate it.

27 July 2014

Broad Knowledge

Recommended by the Barnes & Noble Sci-fi & Fantasy Blog: “The lineup of contributing authors include a wide range of new and established horror and speculative fiction writers, including L. Timmel Duchamp, …Nisi Shawl, [and] D.A. Xiaolin Spires”.

Paperback (978-1-937794-85-9):
Amazon (US) | IndieBound | or:
 



Ebook (978-1-937794-86-6):


Go to: About | Reviews | Goodreads
Released 20 November 2018

About

Broad Knowledge: 35 Women Up To No Good is a feminist anthology of dark fiction and darker knowledge, edited by Joanne Merriam. Containing 35 stories of “bad” women, and “good” women who just haven’t been caught yet, it features 35 fearless writers who identify as female, non-binary, or a marginalized sex or gender identity. It’s the second in the Women Up To No Good series, which can be read in any order. It’s forthcoming on 20 November 2018.

Our contributors are based in or hailing from Australia, Canada, China, the Czech Republic, India, the Philippines, and all over the United States. Between them, they have won the Aeronautilus, Encouragement, Fresh Voices, Tiptree, and World Fantasy Awards, and been shortlisted for the Aurora, Bram Stoker, and Ignotus, as well as numerous others! We also include two stories in translation, one by Argentine author Teresa P. Mira de Echeverría and the other by Galician writer and poet Estíbaliz Espinosa.

Table of Contents

  • Charlotte Ashley, “She Falls”
  • R. S. Benedict, “Clara Vox”
  • Megan Chaudhuri, “First mouse model of Innsmouth Fish-man Syndrome draft 2 USE THIS VERSION – edits by MK.doc”
  • Autumn Christian, “Flowers for Dogman”
  • Vida Cruz, “Blushing Blue”
  • Sarina Dorie, “The Visitations of Seraphim by Biblical Scholar Father Anthony Maguire”
  • L. Timmel Duchamp, “The Forbidden Words of Margaret A.” (first published in Pulphouse 8, August 1990, and also available in The Women Who Walk Through Fire, ed. Susanna J. Sturgis, Crossing Press, 1990 and in PDF on Duchamp’s website)
  • Estíbaliz Espinosa, “23 commuter line chromosomes” (first published in Galician in Curiosidade, but original in English, translated by the author)
  • A. T. Greenblatt, “Five Meters Ahead, Two Centuries Away”
  • Claudine Griggs, “The Cold Waters of Europa”
  • Audrey R. Hollis, “Your Life Will Look Perfect from Afar”
  • Joanna Michal Hoyt, “Taking It Back”
  • Rebecca Jones-Howe, “Election Season”
  • Ezzy G. Languzzi, “Viva La Muñeca”
  • Maggie Maxwell, “Like I Need a Hole in the Head”
  • Rati Mehrotra, “Make Pretty”
  • Teresa P. Mira de Echeverría, “Liquid Glass” (trans. Lawrence Schimel)
  • Premee Mohamed, “Below the Kirk, Below the Hill”
  • Wendy Nikel, “Maidens of the Sea”
  • Julie Nováková, “Frankenstein Sonata”
  • Aimee Ogden, “Matched Set”
  • Therese Pieczynski, “Three Days, Two Nights”
  • Laura E. Price, “Mary in the Looking Glass”
  • Clarice Radrick, “The Red”
  • Nisi Shawl, “Street Worm” (first published in Streets of Shadows, Alliteration Ink, 2014; also appeared in Street Magicks, Prime Books, 2016)
  • Tabitha Sin, “The Donor”
  • Angela Slatter, “The Song of Sighs” (first published in Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth, 2013; also appeared in New Cthulhu 2: More Recent Weird, 2015)
  • D.A. Xiaolin Spires, “Sunbasker”
  • Priya Sridhar, “Tidal Bloom”
  • Jae Steinbacher, “Blood Sausage”
  • Sonya Taaffe, “Like Milkweed” (first appeared in Not One of Us #52, ed. John Benson, October 2014)
  • Liz Ulin, “Profanity”
  • Marie Vibbert, “Infinite Boyfriends”
  • Mingzhao Xu, “Think, Baby Turtle”
  • Xin Niu Zhang, “The Ladies in the Moon”

Contributors

Charlotte Ashley is a writer, editor and bookseller living in Toronto, Canada. Her fantasy and science fiction short stories have appeared in F&SF, Clockwork Canada, Luna Station Quarterly, Kaleidotrope, PodCastle, and elsewhere. Her historical fantasy, “La Héron,” was nominated for both the Aurora and Sunburst Awards in 2016. You can find more about her at www.once-and-future.com or on Twitter @CharlotteAshley.

R. S. Benedict grew up in rural New York but spent three years living in China. Her work has appeared in Unicorn Booty and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

A toxicologist by training and a writer by inclination, Megan Chaudhuri lives outside Seattle with one spouse and two cats. Her fiction has appeared in Analog, Crossed Genres, GigaNotoSaurus, and other venues.

Autumn Christian is a fiction writer who lives in the dark woods with poisonous blue flowers in her backyard and a black deer skull on her wall. She is waiting for the day when she hits her head on the cabinet searching for the popcorn bowl and all consensus reality dissolves. She’s been a freelance writer, a game designer, a cheese producer, a haunted house actor, and a video game tester. She considers Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, Katie Jane Garside, the southern gothic, and dubstep, as main sources of inspiration.

Vida Cruz is a Filipina born, bred, and based in the Philippines. A 2017 Writers of the Future winner and a 2014 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop, her fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Writers of the Future vol. 34, Expanded Horizons, Lontar: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction, Philippine Speculative Fiction, and the Australian fantasy anthology Phantazein. In her spare time, she draws pretty things, pets all the dogs, and claws at her towering TBR pile. Tweet her at @laviecestmoi. If you’d like to help the rebuilding or rehabilitation efforts for the Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda survivors, this charity is a good place to make inquiries: Save the Children.

 

 

Sarina Dorie has sold about 100 short stories to markets like Daily Science Fiction, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Orson Scott Card’s IGMS, Cosmos, and Sword and Laser. Her steampunk romance series, The Memory Thief, and her collections, Fairies, Robots and Unicorns—Oh My! and Ghosts, Werewolves and Zombies—Oh My! are available on Amazon, along with other books. You can find more information about her short stories and novels on her website: sarinadorie.com.

L. Timmel Duchamp is the author of several books, including The Waterdancer’s World and Never at Home. Her five-novel Marq’ssan Cycle series was awarded a Special Honor by the 2009 James Tiptree, Jr. Award jury. In 2004, she founded Aqueduct Press, which now claims the lion’s share of her time and effort and for which she was a finalist for the 2017 World Fantasy Special Award—Professional. She lives in Seattle. Find her at ltimmelduchamp.com. (You can read her story in PDF at her website.)

Estíbaliz Espinosa: She is the author of seven science poetry books, some short stories about scientific women, and also poetry translation. She was awarded the Afundación – PEN Poetry Prize in 2017. In addition to writing, she works as a musician and science journalist. Hispanic philologist, sociologist, and amateur astronomer. Her work has been translated into English, Welsh, Catalan, Hebrew, Japanese, Macedonian, and Italian. Her last poetry book is Curiosidade (Curiosity), in which “23 commuter line chromosomes” first appeared, in Galician. She is from A Coruña, Spain.

A.T. Greenblatt is a mechanical engineer by day and a writer by night. She lives in Philadelphia where she’s well acquainted with all four seasons and is known to frequently subject her friends to various cooking and home brewing experiments. She is a graduate of Viable Paradise XVI and Clarion West 2017. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Uncanny, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Fireside, as well as other fine places. You can find her online at atgreenblatt.com and on Twitter at @AtGreenblatt.

 

 

Claudine Griggs is the Writing Center Director at Rhode Island College, and her publications include three nonfiction books about transsexuals along with a couple dozen articles on writing, teaching, and other topics. She has also begun writing fiction and plans to draft more science fiction, her first-love genre as a teenager. Her fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Escape Pod, Zahir Tales, Leading Edge SF, The Chaffey Review, New Theory, Not a Pipe Publishing, and Baen Books’ Best Military and Adventure Science Fiction (June 2016). Griggs earned her BA and MA in English at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.

Audrey R. Hollis, 2018 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, is a Los Angeles-based writer. Her fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Lunch Ticket, and Daily Science Fiction, among other places. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram @audreyrhollis or visit her website www.audreyrhollis.com.

Joanna Michal Hoyt lives with her family on a Catholic Worker farm in upstate NY where she spends her days tending goats, gardens and guests and her evenings reading and writing odd stories. Her fiction has appeared in publications including Crossed Genres, Daily Science Fiction, and Mysterion. She can be found online at joannamichalhoyt.com.

 

 

Rebecca Jones-Howe is the author of the short story collection Vile Men. Her work has been published in [PANK], Punchnel’s, and Pulp Modern, among others. She lives in Kamloops, British Columbia and is currently at work on her first novel. She can be found online at rebeccajoneshowe.com.

Ezzy G. Languzzi is a Latinx writer of speculative short fiction.

Maggie Maxwell has been writing stories that make physicists roll in their graves since 1994. She currently lives in North Carolina with her husband, a collection of the ghosts of plants she’s killed, and a large number of overworked and underpaid bookshelves. Her work has been published on Daily Science Fiction. She can be found on Twitter as @wanderingquille.

 

 

Born and raised in India, Rati Mehrotra makes her home in Toronto, Canada. Her first book, Markswoman, was published in January 2018 and the sequel, Mahimata, will be published in March 2019. Her stories have appeared in Apex Magazine, AE – The Canadian Science Fiction Review, IGMS, Podcastle, Cast of Wonders, and many more. Find her at ratiwrites.com.

Argentine author Teresa P. Mira de Echeverría holds a doctorate in philosophy and is a university professor. Her novelette, Memory, is also available from Upper Rubber Boot Books (in a translation into English by Lawrence Schimel, who also translated “Liquid Glass”), and was a finalist for the Spanish national science fiction award, the Ignotus. Her other titles include a novella, Antumbra, Umbra y Penumbra (Editorial Cerbero, 2018), a short novel, El tren (Café con Leche, 2016), and a collection of stories, Diez varaiaciones sobre el amor (Editorial Cerbero, 2017).

Premee Mohamed is an Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction writer based in Canada. Her work has been published by Nightmare Magazine, Martian Migraine Press, Innsmouth Free Press, and many others. She can be found on Twitter at @premeesaurus.

 

 

Wendy Nikel is a speculative fiction author with a degree in elementary education, a fondness for road trips, and a terrible habit of forgetting where she’s left her cup of tea. Her short fiction has been published by Daily Science Fiction, Nature: Futures, and is forthcoming from Analog. Her time travel novella series, beginning with The Continuum, is available from World Weaver Press. For more info, visit wendynikel.com.

Julie Nováková is a Czech author and translator of SF, fantasy and detective stories. She has published short fiction in Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Analog, and elsewhere. Her work in Czech includes seven novels, one anthology (Terra Nullius) and over thirty short stories. Some of her works have been also translated into Chinese, Romanian, Estonian, German and Filipino. She received the Encouragement Award of the European science fiction and fantasy society in 2013, and the Aeronautilus award for the best Czech short story of 2014 and 2015, and for the best novel of 2015. Read more at www.julienovakova.com and follow her on Twitter @Julianne_SF.

Aimee Ogden is a former science teacher and software tester; now she writes stories about sad astronauts and angry princesses. Her work has also appeared in Shimmer, Apex, and Escape Pod.

Therese Pieczynski has published in Asimov’s, Daily Science Fiction, River City, the anthology Imagination Fully Dilated, and in 2012 with Nancy Kress in New Under The Sun as part of the Stellar Guild series brought out by Arc Manor.

Laura E. Price lives in southwestern Florida with her husband and son. Her work has appeared in On Spec, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, GigaNotoSaurus, Penumbra eMag, Gallery of Curiosities, The Best of Metaphorosis 2017, and Betwixt. She also blogs at seldnei.wordpress.com.

Clarice Radrick’s work can be found in Myriad Lands Volume 1, Havok, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Nightmare Stalkers and Dream Walkers, Spellbound, Haiku of the Dead, Under the Juniper Tree, Inchoate Echoes, and The Brisling Tide. For more information, visit www.clariceradrick.com.

Nisi Shawl is the author of the Belgian Congo steampunk novel Everfair, co-author of Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, and co-editor of Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler and Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany. Her story collection Filter House co-won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award in 2009 and was nominated for that year’s World Fantasy Award. She is a co-founder and Steering Committee member of the Carl Brandon Society, a nonprofit supporting the presence of people of color in the fantastic genres, and she also serves on the writing workshop Clarion West’s board of directors.

 

 

Tabitha Sin is a speculative fiction and hybrid memoir-fiction writer. Her science fiction works have been published in Dear Robot: An Anthology of Epistolary Science Fiction and Amok: An Anthology of Asia-Pacific Speculative Fiction. Her hybrid memoir-fiction pieces can be found in Side B Magazine and Moonroots zine. She is a VONA alum and a mango fiend.

Angela Slatter is the author of the urban fantasy novels Vigil and Corpselight, as well as eight short story collections, including The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales, Sourdough and Other Stories, The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings, and A Feast of Sorrows: Stories. She has won a World Fantasy Award, a British Fantasy Award, a Ditmar, and six Aurealis Awards. Vigil was nominated for the Dublin Literary Award 2018. Find her at www.angelaslatter.com.

D.A. Xiaolin Spires steps into portals and reappears in sites such as Hawai’i, NY, various parts of Asia and elsewhere, with her keyboard appendage attached. Her work appears or is forthcoming in publications such as Clarkesworld, Analog, Nature, Terraform, Strange Horizons, Grievous Angel, Fireside, Galaxy’s Edge, StarShipSofa, Andromeda Spaceways (Year’s Best Issue), Diabolical Plots, Factor Four, Pantheon, Outlook Springs, ROBOT DINOSAURS, Shoreline of Infinity, LONTAR, Mithila Review, Reckoning, Issues in Earth Science, Liminality, Star*Line, Polu Texni, Argot, Eye to the Telescope, Liquid Imagination, Gathering Storm Magazine, Little Blue Marble, Story Seed Vault, and anthologies of the strange and beautiful: Broad Knowledge, Deep Signal, Ride the Star Wind, Sharp and Sugar Tooth, Future Visions, and Battling in All Her Finery. She can be found on Twitter: @spireswriter and on her website: daxiaolinspires.wordpress.com.

A 2016 MBA graduate and published author, Priya Sridhar has been writing fantasy and science fiction for fifteen years. She believes that every story is a journey, and that a good tale allows the reader to escape to a new world. She also enjoys reading, biking, movie-watching, and classical music. Priya lives in Miami, Florida with her family and posts monthly at her blog www.priyajsridhar.com.

 

 

Jae Steinbacher is a speculative fiction writer, editor, and wanderer soon to call Seattle home. Her stories have appeared in The Overcast, Terraform, Escape Pod, PodCastle, and other venues. She was a 2017-18 North Carolina Arts Council fellow and a finalist for the Speculative Literature Foundation’s 2017 Diverse Writers and Diverse Worlds grants. Jae is the Workshop Administrator for the Clarion West Writers Workshop and attended in 2014. You can find her on Twitter at @JaeSteinbacher or visit her website, julie-steinbacher.com.

Sonya Taaffe reads dead languages and tells living stories. Her short fiction and poetry have been collected most recently in Forget the Sleepless Shores (Lethe Press) and previously in Singing Innocence and Experience, Postcards from the Province of Hyphens, A Mayse-Bikhl, and Ghost Signs. She lives with her husband and two cats in Somerville, Massachusetts, where she writes about film for Patreon and remains proud of naming a Kuiper belt object.

Liz Ulin was a winner of the Fresh Voices Screenplay Competition, and a finalist in The Canadian Short Script Competition, The Canadian Authors Association Short Story Competition, and The Writers Union of Canada Short Prose Competition. She has also had several short stories adapted and produced at Montreal’s Centaur Theatre.

 

 

Besides selling thirty-odd short stories, a dozen poems and a few comics, Marie Vibbert has been a medieval (SCA) squire, ridden 17% of the roller coasters in the United States and has played O-line and D-line for the Cleveland Fusion women’s tackle football team. Her work has been called “…the embodiment of what science fiction should be…” by The Oxford Culture Review.

Mingzhao Xu immigrated to the United States from China as a child. One of her greatest joys in life is using fiction to highlight the humor, challenges and pathos of her childhood. She currently lives in California.

Xin Niu Zhang was born in Shanghai, grew up in Toronto, and is currently studying at the University of Waterloo. Her ultimate aspiration is to write a book glamorizing the lives of accountants.

 

 

Editor Joanne Merriam has most recently edited How to Live on Other Planets: A Handbook for Aspiring Aliens, The Museum of All Things Awesome And That Go Boom, and, with H. L. Nelson, Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good.

Her poetry and fiction have appeared in The Glaze from Breaking (Stride, 2005), and in dozens of magazines and journals, including Asimov’s Science Fiction, Escape Pod, The Fiddlehead, [PANK], and Strange Horizons.

In 2004, she immigrated to the USA from Canada. She has lived in Nova Scotia, Ontario, Kentucky, and New Hampshire, and now resides in Nashville, Tennessee.

She runs Upper Rubber Boot Books, administers Small Press Week, volunteers for Postcards to Voters and More Than Medicine, and runs a surgical fellowship and the lives of four oncologists for a local hospital. You can visit her at www.joannemerriam.com.

 

 

Reviews & Mentions

Mentioned in:

Overall, I have to say that most of the stories were a solid 3-4 stars for me: there were many creative ideas, but only a few stories really shone for me. However, I also didn’t find any stories that I hated, which is always a good thing, and a pretty good achievement with more than 30 stories. . . . As you can see, there really is a variety in the stories – some of them involve mythology or legends, some are sci-fi with robots, and some are realistic/contemporary with a strong woman protagonist. All of the stories go to dark places, although the degree to which they do can also vary a lot.

—”Review: Broad Knowledge,” Alexa, A Thousand Worlds, 15 June 2018

Our Kickstarter was mentioned, promoted, or reviewed in:

Many thanks to Christi Craig for hosting the cover reveal for Broad Knowledge: 35 Women Up To No Good. We changed covers after the Kickstarter, and the old cover was our Kickstarter exclusive!

20 November 2018

I thought you understood about transformation.

Last night, we posted a new cover for Broad Knowledge, after receiving feedback that it didn’t fit its genre. Our donors will choose (in the backer survey sent out after the campaign ends) which of the two covers becomes the actual published version! You can still get whichever cover you like, no matter which one wins; one of the covers will be a Kickstarter exclusive.

In honor of our new cover, both of today’s stories are from Broad Knowledge, and both involve visitations of numinous creatures: Sarina Dorie’s “The Visitations of Seraphim by Biblical Scholar Father Anthony Maguire” and Sonya Taaffe’s “Like Milkweed” (from which today’s cover comes).

Taaffe’s story, a reprint which originally appeared in 2014 in Not One of Us #52, is of a woman, Alicja, talking to a mysterious visiting alien about her ex-girlfriend, who left her after staying with her through her transition, because of the aliens, in a roundabout way. It’s a contemplative and emotionally raw story, gorgeously told.

Of her story, Sarina Dorie writes:

With many of my stories, the premise starts as a question or concept. For The Visitations of Seraphim by Biblical Scholar Father Anthony Maguire, I started off thinking about the questions all of us probably ask about angels. Historically or mythologically they are supposed to be genderless but we always create angels in our image, so what if we wrote about genderless angels or angels that choose their gender? If modern day humans were faced with the divine and it was so beautiful we couldn’t comprehend it, how would we react?

 

About the Authors

Sarina Dorie has sold about 100 short stories to markets like Daily Science Fiction, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Orson Scott Card’s IGMS, Cosmos, and Sword and Laser. Her steampunk romance series, The Memory Thief, and her collections, Fairies, Robots and Unicorns—Oh My! and Ghosts, Werewolves and Zombies—Oh My! are available on Amazon, along with other books. You can find more information about her quirky fantasy series or other short stories or novels at sarinadorie.com.

Sonya Taaffe’s short fiction and poetry can be found most recently in the collection Ghost Signs (Aqueduct Press) and in the anthologies The Museum of All Things Awesome and That Go Boom, Genius Loci: Tales of the Spirit of Place, and An Alphabet of Embers: An Anthology of Unclassifiables. She reads dead languages for fun, edits living poets for Strange Horizons, and lives in Somerville, MA with her husband and two cats. She once named a Kuiper belt object.

26 June 2018

There’s a slight green sheen. Not from the lichen or whatever, just normal rot.

About today’s two stories, editor Octavia Cade writes:

Are there limits to the consumptions we’ll perform as a community, as H. Pueyo argues in “I Eat”? When we choose, as ecosystem actors, to act to the detriment of that ecosystem as a whole, is there ever any coming back from that? We tell ourselves stories of single persons and change, but there are times this takes on the sticky-sweet patina of myth, and by framing her question within a post-apocalyptic environment Pueyo questions the choices we can make as part of a learning and adaptive community.

In the absence of that community we lose a culture. In the second post- apocalyptic story of the anthology, Rem Wigmore in “Who Watches” follows the single survivor of a lichen infestation that is so transformative its victims are no longer human. They remain edible, but as Sam navigates the wreck of her old life, eating what was once her own kind, she’s still the last gasp of an old method of consumption. The new has adapted, evolved, and has its own method of eating outsiders, turning them into something else.

 

Also!

We have a little news: Broad Knowledge contributor Rati Mehrotra just had another of her stories longlisted for the Sunburst Awards! (Ursula Pflug, who had a story in our anthology The Museum of All Things Awesome and That Go Boom, is also on the list.) Congratulations to all!

We’ve also made the weekly roundup at Paper Cat Press, and at the International Examiner: Seattle’s Asian Pacific Islander nonprofit news source since 1974.

 

About the Authors

H. Pueyo is a South American writer, currently living somewhere in Brazil. She writes short stories and comics of many genres, published both in English and Portuguese. Find her portfolio at querellepueyo.com or follow her on Twitter: @argiopidae.

Rem Wigmore, also published under Summer Wigmore, is a speculative fiction writer based in Wellington. Their first novel The Wind City was published in 2013 by Steam Press and they had a short story in the 2016 At the Edge anthology. They like coffee, snacks, and destroying the patriarchy.

24 June 2018

Contributor news!

It’s been a pretty long time—nine months!—since I’ve shared contributor news, so I have a long list of stuff for you to read and enjoy below.

 
Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days contributors:

 
Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good contributors:

FullSizeRender

 
How to Live on Other Planets: A Handbook for Aspiring Aliens contributors:

the-grace-of-kings-9781481424271

 
The Museum of All Things Awesome and That Go Boom (which will be released next year) contributors:

 
Soles Series contributors:

 
The Twelfth Planet book Letters to Tiptree includes many talented writers, including URB authors Rose Lemberg, Alex Dally MacFarlane, Sarah Pinsker, Cat Rambo, Nisi Shawl, Lucy Sussex, Rachel Swirsky, and Bogi Takács.

And, finally, Flight 505: A Novella‘s author Leslie Bohem has a TV series with Hulu involving psychics and organized crime that’s going to be awesome.

31 October 2015

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