Unlikely Story

Announcing Unlikely Story #10: The Journal of Unlikely Entomology

We’re thrilled to announce the ToC for Unlikely Story #10: The Journal of Unlikely Entomology. In no particular order, the issue will feature…

Miranda’s Wings by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro
Bookends by Michael Wehunt
Prism City Blues by Naim Kabir
Gemma Bugs Out by Victorya Chase
On Shine Wings by Polenth Blake
Coping With Common Garden Pests by Will Kaufman
Meltdown in Freezer Three by Luna Lindsey

Thank you again to everyone who submitted work for this issue. As so frequently happens, we had some tough choices to make here. Unlikely Story #10: The Journal of Unlikely Entomology will be out in November. We can’t wait to share these stories with you!

In the meantime, we continue to read submissions for Unlikely Story #11: The Journal of Unlikely Cryptography. The guidelines can be found here. We’ll be reading for our Unlikely Coulrophobia mini issue soon.

An Unlikely Interview with Shira Lipkin

The Cartographer’s Requiem plays with the notion of representation transforming reality, as the drawing of a map and the singing of a song remake the world. The story is full of lush, gorgeous imagery, but color seems to play a particularly important role, with each cartographer having a color they consider ‘theirs’. Do you see color representing something fundamental about each cartographer, or are they transformed into who they are by the color associated with them?

Color was actually the first thing I knew about this story; I had the image of a red train on a parchment-colored background, and I thought “what is this train for?” and answered myself, “the cartographer’s funeral.”

And then tucked that into my hindbrain for years.

So there was a red train, to start with. But also, the entire time we “know” the cartographer, she’s been ill; at the end, she’s coughing blood. At the same time, what we know of the cartographer and her world is that the cartography, in part, makes the world. Someone’s maps are a look inside them. And, well, as Clive Barker said, wherever we’re opened, we’re red.

As far as the second cartographer’s color, I picked green just because it’s on the opposite side of the color wheel! Contrast. Maybe someday I’ll revisit and see how his maps might be different…

When you travel or visit a new area, are you the kind of person who likes to use a map (or GPS) to get to know the place, or do you prefer to explore and figure things out as you go along? Similarly, when it comes to fiction, do you outline, or do you start writing and find the story that way?

I most prefer to have a local guide! Both because I have terrible trouble with spatial relations, and because a map can’t tell me where the best ice cream is. 🙂

Generally I just start writing and find the story along the way, but it does tend to germinate for a while in the back of my head before I sit down to write it. With short stories I usually just set off on the adventure; with longer work, I always know what my endgame is, and I always know my final lines or paragraphs. But I leave myself open to surprises along the way.

Authors are notorious for working strange jobs. Stephen King was a janitor and J.D. Salinger worked as the entertainment director on a luxury cruise line. What’s the weirdest job you’ve ever had, and did it inspire any stories or teach you anything you’ve used in your writing?

Well, I did some exotic dancing when I lived in Vegas! It was indeed a fascinating window into the human psyche (no, really), and I’ve definitely used it in my writing. Working on something tangentially related to it right now.

We all have our favorite authors, some of whom everyone has heard of, and some of whom are relatively obscure. Who is one of the more obscure writers you love? What do you love about their work? Tell us which story or novel of theirs we should drop everything to read right now.

I’m not really sure where the line of obscurity lies! I don’t see nearly enough people in genre talking about Nick Harkaway, for example, but he seems to be selling well. Can I talk nonfiction? If you like neuroscience, you absolutely need to be reading V.S. Ramachandran. Brilliant and funny. Start with Phantoms in the Brain. For history, Tom Standage covers topics as diverse as telegraphy as the Victorian internet (complete with long-distance romance!), the discovery of Neptune, and the history of the world through the lens of alcoholic beverages. Rebecca Solnit’s essays are pure poetry. But my favorite nonfiction book of the past howeverlong is Perfumes: The Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez. Obsessive, in-depth, often-hilarious analysis of the history of perfume and hundreds of reviews of modern perfumes. Wonderfully written. I was texting people quotes the whole time I was reading it.

We all start somewhere, and the learning curve from first publication is a steep one. What’s your first ever published work, and how do you feel about it now?

My poem “Wool and Silk and Wood”, in Electric Velocipede! It was the first poem I’d written since high school. I have no idea how it happened, it just fell out of me all poem-shaped, and I sent it to Klima, and he bought it. It is such an act of chutzpah to send out your first submission. I’m glad I did.

Now? Now I look at it and I know that I could do so much better! But Klima still likes it — he made a friend read it at Wiscon last year, and he’s reprinting it in The Best of Electric Velocipede. And that acceptance gave me the confidence to keep working and do better. So thank you, little poem.

What else are you working on have coming up you want people to know about?

My first- and second-ever stories, which sort of mirror each other, will be reprinted together in an ebook by Upper Rubber Boot! The second story was in a charity anthology and had yet to be reprinted, and has some of the weirdest-job stuff in it. I’ll be happy to get that where people can read it.

I am currently working on a novel and, apparently, three short stories at once.

Shira Lipkin’s short fiction and poetry have appeared in such marvelous places as Strange Horizons, Stone Telling, Clockwork Phoenix 4, Interfictions 2, and more (full bibliography at shiralipkin.com). She won the Rhysling Award for best short poem in 2012; she co-edits Liminality, a magazine of speculative poetry, with Mat Joiner. She lives in Boston and, in her spare time, fights crime with the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center. Her cat is bigger than her dog.

An Unlikely Interview with James Van Pelt

In This Gray Rock, Standing Tall, a map literally and metaphorically leads your main character to a deeper connection with both his father and his son, and a new understanding of himself and his place in the world. Have you ever experienced a moment like that, where a physical object, or something someone left behind, completely changed your perception of that person, or yourself?

A lot of “This Gray Rock, Standing Tall” felt autobiographical. None of the events in the story are from memory, but a lot of the emotion of trying to connect with my father set the tone in the piece. He’s knee deep into Alzheimer’s, and I’ve spent a lot of time considering my relationship to him as he slips away. He’s in a care center right now, so the family has been going through the house we grew up in, preparing it for sale. My sisters found an old telescope of his, a giant brass and glass instrument that any self-respecting pirate would be glad to call his own. I’ve contemplated that telescope frequently since it turned up. Dad was an aeronautical engineer. He worked on many of the projects that were a part of the nation’s race to space. Holding that old telescope, thinking about how often he must have turned it to the stars before I was born, makes me see him as he must have been when he was young. I’m having a plaque made for it to hang on the wall below the telescope. It will read, “Jack Van Pelt, Watcher of the Skies.”

When you travel or visit a new area, are you the kind of person who likes to use a map (or GPS) to get to know the place, or do you prefer to explore and figure things out as you go along? Similarly, when it comes to fiction, do you outline, or do you start writing and find the story that way?

I have no sense of direction, so GPS is the science fictional future that I’m glad to be living in. But I’ve always loved maps. I particularly liked novels that had maps as the end pieces. The first fictional map I remember studying was the one in Ruth Gannet’s children’s book, MY FATHER’S DRAGON. I loved maps with unexplored areas, including the ones that read, “Here there be dragons.” Someone asked me about my writing process not long ago, and I told them that one part of the process I really enjoyed is when I start a new story. I type my name and address in the upper left, tab down to the middle of the page, think of a title (even if it will probably change later), and then pause before I plunge into the blank space below. That blank space is the map of unexplored territory. I have no idea what surprises await me there.

Authors are notorious for working strange jobs. Stephen King was a janitor and J.D. Salinger worked as the entertainment director on a luxury cruise line. What’s the weirdest job you’ve ever had, and did it inspire any stories or teach you anything you’ve used in your writing?

I did temp work when I was in grad school. Most of the time is was secretarial, but I took a job for a week unloading a urea barge in the Port of Sacramento. The product came down the coast from Alaska in barges longer than a city block. At first, the urea, which are white, slightly sticky pellets, unloads by gravity onto conveyor belts. For a day, I manned a section of the belt with the urea pounding down from the containers above. The noise deafened and the dust blinded. Once the easy stuff was out, though, the rest had to moved with huge front-end loaders. They trained me on one, and for the next few days, I ran this giant machine inside the barge, grabbing bucket loads of the product and then dumping down to the conveyors. The wall of urea towered over the machine. The foreman told me to be careful not to undercut the wall, or the whole mess would come down, cover the front-end loader, and probably kill me. I spent my entire time on that job scared to death, and very, very sorry I’d taken it. It’s largest impact on my writing was to convince me I was better behind a desk or in a classroom than I was doing industrial labor.

One of the perennial points of contention in the world revolves around education — who should get educated (and to what degree), what should be taught, who should be excluded. Meanwhile, children in their classrooms ask, “Why do I need to know this?” Tell us one obscure thing you learned in school that you think is important, and why.

I teach high school and college English, so I think about education most of the time. In this era of standardized testing and common core standards, I keep coming back to what I thought were the two most important lessons I learned in high school. I don’t know if they are obscure — they feel obvious to me — but I don’t hear people talking about them. The first was that answers could be found. That lesson doesn’t have anything to do with math or science or grammar knowledge, but it’s what I got out of school. If I apply myself, and I continue looking, I can find answers. That one lesson has taken me a long way. The rest of my own education, I think, was about learning of different ways to think. I don’t remember much from my math classes, but I’m aware of mathematical thinking. I don’t remember much from science, but I know something about the scientific method. I can’t recall names and dates, but I see history as an interrelationship of forces. Those were my important lessons. High school, at least, seems to me to be the place where we learn there are answers to be found, and that there are different, logical ways to look at the world.

We all have our favorite authors, some of whom everyone has heard of, and some of whom are relatively obscure. Who is one of the more obscure writers you love? What do you love about their work? Tell us which story or novel of theirs we should drop everything to read right now.

Once again, not obscure, but I think under read, is Robert Holdstock, most specifically, his novel MYTHAGO WOOD. I’ve worn out a couple of copies, and I’ve given away several. Interestingly enough, MYTHAGO WOOD is also about a son trying to understand an absent father. “This Gray Rock, Standing Tall,” owes a lot to that book. I loved the narrative voice in it. I loved how I was half way through it before I realized that besides being a mystery, it was a dynamite romance, and I identified with its theme of mythic resonances. It’s a great book. Maybe the best epilogue ever.

We all start somewhere, and the learning curve from first publication is a steep one. What’s your first ever published work, and how do you feel about it now?.

My first story sale was a piece in a small magazine named ABERATIONS. It was called “No Small Change.” I still like the story. It was about sex, growing up, mythical superpowers and real-world powers. I think it was published in 1990, when I was thirty-six. I’d been teaching English, both writing and literature, for eight years, and I was into my first year of a two-year graduate program in creative writing. I wasn’t exactly a stranger to the written word by then. I’ve grown a lot since, but I think that story still stands up. I’m not embarrassed to call it my own. There’s a bunch of stories before that one, though, that I’m thoroughly happy have not seen the light of day.

What else are you working on have coming up you want people to know about?

I have a short story in the June Asimov’s. In the meantime, I’m working on a young adult science fiction/fantasy series. And, of course, I’m always writing more stories. I love the short form.

When James Van Pelt isn’t writing, he teaches high school and college English in Grand Junction, Colorado. His work has appeared in Asimov’s, Analog, Weird Tales and numerous other venues. His latest short story collection, Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille, appeared in 2012. His wife and three sons think he tells a pretty good bedtime story.

An Unlikely Interview with Kat Howard

Have you ever visited Station Island and the site known as St. Patrick’s Purgatory, which plays a central role in All of Our Past Places? If so, what was your experience going there? If not, do you plan to visit, and do you think your perception of the place will be colored by having written this story?

I’ve been to Ireland, but not to Station Island. I’d love to go — I’ve been fascinated by the place since I first learned about it, and I’m also very interested in pilgrimage sites and sacred places in general. I love the idea that there are places that connect us more closely to the numinous, where the act of going is in and of itself somehow special or sacred.

When you travel or visit a new area, are you the kind of person who likes to use a map (or GPS) to get to know the place, or do you prefer to explore and figure things out as you go along? Similarly, when it comes to fiction, do you outline, or do you start writing and find the story that way?

I am appallingly bad at navigation. I cannot read a map, and seem to have a particular talent for getting lost. So much so, that when I told people I was working on this story, there was this sort of shocked pause. Seriously, if we are ever going anywhere together, do not let me drive, even if we have a GPS.

Perhaps because I’m so bad at navigation, I also tend not to be an outliner. I write because I don’t know how the story ends, and I want to figure that out. Now, this is a technique that sometimes has its disadvantages -- I’ve had to do revisions where I started over from scratch, and for this story, I literally cut a draft apart and stapled it back together during a revision. I will also get to the end of a draft, especially of a longer project, and then reverse outline, to make sure that what I think happened in the story actually made it onto the page.

Authors are notorious for working strange jobs. Stephen King was a janitor and J.D. Salinger worked as the entertainment director on a luxury cruise line. What’s the weirdest job you’ve ever had, and did it inspire any stories or teach you anything you’ve used in your writing?

This isn’t weird so much as unusual. I’m a former competitive fencer, and I filled in as an assistant coach while a friend was on vacation. Not bad in and of itself, but it was for a beginning youth class, so a room full of ten-year-olds with swords, which is an interesting set of people to be in charge of. And yes, I’ve put fencing in my writing, most directly in “The Calendar of Saints,” which was published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

One of the perennial points of contention in the world revolves around education — who should get educated (and to what degree), what should be taught, who should be excluded. Meanwhile, children in their classrooms ask, “Why do I need to know this?” Tell us one obscure thing you learned in school that you think is important, and why.

Well, I learned what and where St. Patrick’s Purgatory is.

It was sort of odd, all things considered, that I didn’t know before, (I’m Catholic, the bulk of my ancestry is Irish, and I’m a huge Shakespeare fangirl) but it was my first semester in grad school. I was TAing the Intro to Shakespeare course for the woman who eventually became my advisor, Rebecca Krug. She was lecturing on Hamlet, and explains the reason why Hamlet swears by Saint Patrick when talking to his father’s ghost — because of Saint Patrick’s Purgatory. I instantly became fascinated with the place — I wrote about it in grad school papers, read Seamus Heaney’s poems about it, Station Island, and once I started writing fiction, knew I wanted to set a story there. (I also love a good visit to the Underworld story.)

In terms of the world at large, is that important? No. But it reminds me that no matter how much you think you know about something, you can always learn something new. There are always things that we don’t see, so if you’re curious, ask questions, and keep on asking. And when you think about it like that, when you think about what parts of stories get told, and what parts of narratives get taught, and how those narratives are constructed, then it does become important.

We all start somewhere, and the learning curve from first publication is a steep one. What’s your first ever published work, and how do you feel about it now?

My first published work was the short story “A Life in Fictions,” in the anthology Stories, edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio. I am still proud of it, and it remains one of my favorite things that I’ve written.

What else are you working on have coming up you want people to know about?

I am very excited about the novella I have coming out in September. It’s called The End of the Sentence, and I cowrote it with Maria Dahvana Headley. It’s a haunted house story, full of mysterious letters from a prison inmate who may or may not be dead, or something worse. It has fairy tales, and mythologies, and writing it with Maria was the most fun I’ve had giving myself nightmares.

Kat Howard is the World Fantasy Award-nominated author of over twenty pieces of short fiction. Her work has been performed on NPR as part of Selected Shorts, and has appeared in Lightspeed, Subterranean, and Apex, among other venues. Her novella, The End of the Sentence, written with Maria Dahvana Headley, will be out in September from Subterranean Press. You can find her on twitter as @KatWithSword and she blogs at strangeink.blogspot.com.

A Round-Up of Reviews

Unlikely Story #9: The Journal of Unlikely Cartography has received a handful of nice reviews over the last few days.

Lois Tilton of Locus Online reviewed the issue, saying, “This quirky little zine always manages to pull me in with its concepts, and this one delivers a couple of strong stories.”

T.X. Watson provided a nice write-up of Carrie Cuinn’s How to Recover a Relative Lost During Transmatter Shipping, In Five Easy Steps, and also had kind things to say about our Unlikely Cartography panel at Readercon.

Last, but not least, Charlotte Ashley wrote a thoughtful and in-depth review of Rhonda Eikamp’s The Occluded for Clavis Aurea, her regular review column at Apex, calling it “an unquestionable page-turner”.