Are you looking for something to fill the gap between trick-or-treaters this evening? Here’s a little something you might enjoy: “Among the Moabites,” a story that was originally published in the Cherry Bleeds journal and featured on the Pseudopod podcast, available free from Gumroad in PDF, ePUB, and MOBI formats.
A bit more about this story here.
2011 was my year of finding homes for difficult stories. “Showing” didn’t get rejected by as many journals as did Open Every Womb and Summer Rotation, but it still took a few years to find its perfect home.
That home, it turns out, was with The Packinghouse Review. You can get a copy of volume 2, #2 here.
This story grew out of two places and some drawings. The first place was the Godschalx Gallery at St. Norbert College, a small space in one of the campus buildings that shows both student and professional works. The second was the Riverview Café, a neighborhood coffee shop that frequently hangs interesting art (a little bit of the Blue Moon slips in, too, another great neighborhood spot). And the drawings were sketches my father sent to me from Vietnam, when I was two and he was flying helicopters. The rest of the darkness in the story–and on reflection, it is rather a dark story–came from somewhere else, probably the same place that delivers up such cheer as Among the Moabites and Ichthyology.
It’s the season for my more difficult stories to find homes! In July, Open Every Womb landed at Atticus Review; next month, a story that made about eight outings over as many years (some publishers respond very slowly …) will come out; and last weekend, Summer Rotation went up at NONTRUE. This story went out twelve times over eight years before finding its place, but I believe that eventually every story finds its place.
“Summer Rotation” takes place in the context of the “Army brat” world. I’ve only found a few examples of military dependents in fiction: The Way the Crow Flies by Ann-Marie MacDonald, Sweet Talk by Stephanie Vaughn, You Know When the Men Are Gone by Siobhan Fallon, and Durable Goods by Elizabeth Berg. It’s an interesting world–a strange balance of security and danger; a society more stratified than any other in American culture, yet also deeply meritocratic; a culture where ready-made patterns are filled and re-filled every season as families come and go according to the Army’s whims.
This story is a love story, a coming-of-age story, and a story about damage, inflicted by others and by ourselves. Even though it involves children, it’s very much an adult story. I hope you like it.
I’m very excited that my story “Open Every Womb” has finally found a home; it appears in this week’s story collection online from the Atticus Review.
I wrote this story in 2004, and it went out to 24 periodicals before Atticus picked it up. I’m a firm believer that every story has a home; finding that home is one of the toughest parts of the writing game. Until now, Among the Moabites has been the hardest to place, and it only had to go through nine submissions to land at Cherry Bleeds and, a year later, at Pseudopod.
In some ways “Open Every Womb” is similar to “Among the Moabites”, in that it’s a bit dark and disturbing (though I didn’t get comments to that effect when it was rejected, perhaps because “Moabites” is a bit more on the fantasy genre side and “Womb” is in the realistic literary fiction genre, and the norms for comments on rejection are different in those worlds). “Womb”‘s topic is “female circumcision” (an unfortunate euphemism for cliterodectomy, infibulation, and genital mutilation), which isn’t a happy subject.
Not, I think, that the story is a “downer.” It came out of a long and interesting conversation after a pub quiz at the long-gone old Molly Quinn’s (in the building now occupied by the Craftsman on East Lake) with two young doctor friends. Minneapolis has the largest Somali population in the United States, and they had been confronted with infibulation in their practice. They even had reference cards describing the WHO’s categorizations of female genital mutilation. It was a weird contrast: Minnesota, an almost self-parodically liberal state (despite a couple of local loony bins currently running for spots on the GOP presidential ticket), isn’t the sort of place where doctors should have to worry about things like girls having their clitorises and labia minora removed.
Though genital mutilation is a big part of the story, it isn’t really the heart of the story. It’s a character-driven story, very much about the narrator’s relationship to her body, her work, her partner, and her past. Genital mutilation is the catalyst for her growing self-awareness, but it’s not what makes her tick.
Still, if you are driven to learn more about genital mutilation after reading this story, and possibly take some action, here are a few useful resources:
And just in case this should happen to attract the anti-circumcision activists campaigning to stop the male version of genital mutilation, let me note a few of my thoughts on that side:
As oracular devices go, Internet search engines are a little better than reading sheep entrails and a little worse than the I Ching. The Internet is so full of bad and misleading information, that unless you already know what you’re looking for you’ll be easily duped. And because most search engines add a little “wisdom of the crowds” (or the “none of us is as dumb as all of us” principal) to their algorithms, bad information tends to reinforce more bad information. In most cases, you’re better off asking a person–your father (who might lie to you), the guy at the end of the bar (who will definitely lie to you), or a librarian (who will certainly not lie to you, but might giggle when you’re not looking)–or trying to find the answer in a book.
Case in point: this site should be flooded with searches for things like heartbreakingly beautiful short stories and incredibly astute political commentary. Alas, such is not the case. Indeed, some of the searches that have landed people here are a little puzzling indeed.
So, in the spirit of public service, here’s a little help for people who’ve wandered here and have probably not found the answers they wanted.
As noted earlier, the L.A. Times crossword from last weekend has puzzled a lot of people. I thought the traffic from this search would die down quickly, but it’s been steady. I find myself equally bemused and peeved to see it in the analytics logs.
The answer is Byzantium. But you get extra points if you thought the answer might be Innisfree.
Yup, there are different kinds, some more so than others.
Simple, really. Key definitions to learn would be “oxymoron,” “irony,” “sardonicism,” and “mordancy.”
All novels are stories, but not all stories are novels.
Refer to the answer above. “Oxymoron” applies here as well.
Much preferred to anything “healthy.”
Close! Please try again.
It all depends on when you go. Go to the DJ show tonight, and it will set you back £5. Saturday night, £7.50. New Year’s Eve will cost £60. But Sunday afternoon is only £3 if you bring your own horn. This is the site you’re really looking for.
Don’t we all? Yet somehow I’ve never felt moved to vocalize my adoration of WebSphere and Lotus Notes. But, of course, IBM’s praises have indeed been sung:
our reputation sparkles like a gem.
we’ve fought our way through
and new fields we’re sure to conquer, too,
for thee ever onward IBM!
I think that’s a great idea!
Close again! I think you’re looking for Jason Brown, though.
Remember, your homework is due at the beginning of class. More info here.
I do hope this has been helpful!
Imagine the volume of a normal store turned on its side: It was absurdly narrow and dizzyingly tall. And the shelves went all the way up—five stories of books. The whole place was dim and dusty; you couldn’t even really see the ceiling.
Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store, available free to read at the previous link or free to listen to on Escape Pod, is a delightful story about mystery, immortality, and the fate of the book in the digital age. Set in the midst of our current recession, it straddles the worlds of a fanciful antiquarian bookshop and an even more fanciful Google Books project. There are dusty tomes, mysterious gentlemen, delicate robots, astounding technologies, and even a little romance, packed into a story that takes Stephen Ely less than 45 minutes to read. I haven’t read, nor do I intend to read, Dan Brown’s “Symbology” books, but I imagine that this story is what those would have been if Mr. Brown could write engaging sentences and created his own world rather than plundering hoary old Templar myths.
Mr. Sloan is working on a longer story set in the same universe as Mr. Penumbra’s shop; if this story is any indication, that story should be compelling, evocative, and thought-provoking.
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