Marie Brennan's Blog, page 29

Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address

[I encountered this text in Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Potawatomi) earlier this month. I quote her comment there:

Living as a neightbor to the Haudenosaunee, I have heard the Thanksgiving Address in many forms, spoken by many different voices, and I raise my heart to it like raising my face to the rain. But I am not a Haudenosaunee citizen or scholar — just a respectful neighbor and a listener. Because I feared overstepping my boundaries in sharing what I have been told, I asked permission to write about it and how it has influenced my own thinking. Over and over, I was told that these words are a gift of the Haudenosaunee to the world. When I asked Onondaga Faithkeeper Oren Lyons about it, he gave his signature slightly bemused smile and said, “Of course you should write about it. It’s supposed to be shared, otherwise how can it work? We’ve been waiting five hundred years for people to listen. If they’d understood the Thanksgiving then, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

In that same spirit, I share here the most common version of the address, the same one Kimmerer uses in her book.]

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This Thanksgiving address has been used by the six nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) to open and close major gatherings or meetings. The prayer is also sometimes used individually at the beginning or end of the day.

The People

Today we have gathered and we see that the cycles of life continue. We have been given the duty to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things. So now, we bring our minds together as one as we give greetings and thanks to each other as people.

Now our minds are one.

The Earth Mother

We are all thankful to our Mother, the Earth, for she gives us all that we need for life. She supports our feet as we walk about upon her. It gives us joy that she continues to care for us as she has from the beginning of time. To our mother, we send greetings and thanks.

Now our minds are one.

The Waters

We give thanks to all the waters of the world for quenching our thirst and providing us with strength. Water is life. We know its power in many forms — waterfalls and rain, mists and streams, rivers and oceans. With one mind, we send greetings and thanks to the spirit of Water.

Now our minds are one.

The Fish

We turn our minds to the all the Fish life in the water. They were instructed to cleanse and purify the water. They also give themselves to us as food. We are grateful that we can still find pure water. So, we turn now to the Fish and send our greetings and thanks.

Now our minds are one.

The Plants

Now we turn toward the vast fields of Plant life. As far as the eye can see, the Plants grow, working many wonders. They sustain many life forms. With our minds gathered together, we give thanks and look forward to seeing Plant life for many generations to come.

Now our minds are one.

The Food Plants

With one mind, we turn to honor and thank all the Food Plants we harvest from the garden. Since the beginning of time, the grains, vegetables, beans and berries have helped the people survive. Many other living things draw strength from them too. We gather all the Plant Foods together as one and send them a greeting of thanks.

Now our minds are one.

The Medicine Herbs

Now we turn to all the Medicine herbs of the world. From the beginning they were instructed to take away sickness. They are always waiting and ready to heal us. We are happy there are still among us those special few who remember how to use these plants for healing. With one mind, we send greetings and thanks to the Medicines and to the keepers of the Medicines.

Now our minds are one.

The Animals

We gather our minds together to send greetings and thanks to all the Animal life in the world. They have many things to teach us as people. We are honored by them when they give up their lives so we may use their bodies as food for our people. We see them near our homes and in the deep forests. We are glad they are still here and we hope that it will always be so.

Now our minds are one.

The Trees

We now turn our thoughts to the Trees. The Earth has many families of Trees who have their own instructions and uses. Some provide us with shelter and shade, others with fruit, beauty and other useful things. Many people of the world use a Tree as a symbol of peace and strength. With one mind, we greet and thank the Tree life.

Now our minds are one.

The Birds

We put our minds together as one and thank all the Birds who move and fly about over our heads. The Creator gave them beautiful songs. Each day they remind us to enjoy and appreciate life. The Eagle was chosen to be their leader. To all the Birds — from the smallest to the largest — we send our joyful greetings and thanks.

Now our minds are one.

The Four Winds

We are all thankful to the powers we know as the Four Winds. We hear their voices in the moving air as they refresh us and purify the air we breathe. They help us to bring the change of seasons. From the four directions they come, bringing us messages and giving us strength. With one mind, we send our greetings and thanks to the Four Winds.

Now our minds are one.

Closing Words

We have now arrived at the place where we end our words. Of all the things we have named, it was not our intention to leave anything out. If something was forgotten, we leave it to each individual to send such greetings and thanks in their own way.

Now our minds are one.

Thanksgiving Address: Greetings to the Natural World English version: John Stokes and Kanawahienton (David Benedict, Turtle Clan/Mohawk) Mohawk version: Rokwaho (Dan Thompson, Wolf Clan/Mohawk) Original inspiration: Tekaronianekon (Jake Swamp, Wolf Clan/Mohawk).

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Another Uncanny sale!

Something I did not expect on a Sunday afternoon, but was delighted to receive: an email letting me know that Uncanny Magazine is buying another story from me! A piece called “Silver Necklace, Golden Ring,” which is a chilly fairytale-style piece resulting from about five different inspirations smashing into one another; you can read the full background on my site.

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New Worlds: Cultural Virtues

This week, the New Worlds Patreon takes a look at the virtues particularly called out and valorized by a given society — and the pitfalls that can come with making too much of them. Comment over there!

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leverage the tricks you have

I’ve spent the past several days (and have several more to come) gear-shifting between three radically different writing projects. On the one hand, I’m taking this approach because I know my brain can’t just buckle down and slam all the way through one of them in a concentrated go; eventually it starts emitting steam and high-pitched whistles, and then I have to stop or switch to something else. On the other hand, that means I’m putting a different sort of strain on it, by asking it to get into a totally different mode on very short notice.

Thank god for the tactics I developed years ago.

It started out as a way to get myself into the headspace of a novel on days when I didn’t want to write. Well, no, that’s a lie; it started out as an accident: me being obsessed with a ten-minute trance remix of a particular song and listening to it on loop while I happened to be writing what eventually turned into Lies and Prophecy. But it became that thing I just said, and so I got in the habit of associating particular music with particular books. These days it’s more often whole playlists rather than single songs; the former is slightly less insanity-inducing than the latter, but also (if we’re being honest) a bit less effective.

This helps SO MUCH when I have to do this kind of gear-shifting. Even though two of the projects are new enough and small enough that they don’t actually have associated music, I picked out an album in one case, a genre playlist in the other, and when I’m done with A and it’s time for B, I change the music. And it helps. My brain goes, “Oh, techno? I absolutely cannot think about Previous Project with that going on. What else is on offer?” And then I open up the file for Next Project and we’re off.

I’m not claiming it’s foolproof. Also, not everyone can write to music (it’s worth noting that the vast majority of what I listen to is either instrumental or in languages I don’t speak well enough to be distracted by), so it’s not a tactic that can work for everybody. Possibly you could sub in things other than music, like beverages or sitting in different parts of the house, though I think those would be weaker insofar as they’re less likely to evoke particular genres, settings, and moods. But if you can do this: hoo boy does it help.

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My Gabriel Knight New Orleans Tour

Despite having traveled to quite a large percentage of the U.S., up until this year, I had never been to New Orleans.

Heck, I’m not even sure if I’ve been to Louisiana. Some part of my brain says that maybe? my mother and I? drove to Florida one time? (from our home in Dallas), but don’t ask me to swear to that. Even if it’s true, driving through Louisiana on my way to somewhere else hardly counts as visiting the place. And certainly I’d never set foot in New Orleans.

So when this year’s World Fantasy Convention rolled around, scheduled to take place in the Big Easy, Alyc and I decided we’d take a few extra days there and do some proper sightseeing. (They’d never been to New Orleans, either.) Some parts of the city’s appeal are wasted on us — jazz music, for example, or in my case, any food that even has a passing acquaintance with spiciness — but that still left plenty to eat and do.

When it came to deciding what to see and do, though . . . okay, here’s the truth. 90% of what I know about New Orleans comes from Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. Which, yes, is ridiculous. But also, if you have only two days to spend in a city you’ve never visited before, there are worse guiding schemes than “what’s the stuff that shows up in a video game I loved from thirty years ago?”

We did have more guidance than that, mind you, in the form of a local friend. On Day One he took us out to Lake Ponchartrain and the Mardi Gras fountain there, talking about the history and politics of the different krewes. We then went to the Greenwood Cemetery, where I added to my growing stock of cemetery photos (though the recent ones have not yet been added to that gallery). He had to leave us after that, but since he’d driven us through City Park on the way there, Alyc and I decided to wander back and visit the sculpture garden there. Which was nice, but for my money the real gem of that side jaunt was the bayou in the park itself: where we first encountered it, the water could be mistaken for a perfectly flat lawn, so overgrown was it with plant life. Further on we saw what we presume was an actual alligator (we weren’t about to throw anything to see if it was alive or a sculpture) with a bunch of turtles sunning along its back, and later on a whole flock of various waterbirds.

Alyc and I both wanted to do a ghost tour of the Quarter, not just for the ghost stories, but because those things are often entertaining sources of local history. (Alyc studied them back in grad school.) Most of them are on foot, but we opted for a mule-drawn carriage ride, reasoning — very correctly — that by nine p.m. that night, we’d want to sit down rather than walk more, even if it was pricier that way. After dinner with another local friend (one I hadn’t seen in, yikes, fourteen years), we headed over to find our carriage.

I thought at first that Alyc was wrong: that instead of mules, the carriages were drawn by horses. Then I looked properly at the ears. Turns out the mules this company uses are crosses between Mammoth jacks — the largest breed of donkey there is — and draft horses like Belgians and Percherons. They’re HUGE. Ours was named Big Frieda (or Frida? I’m not sure of the spelling), with Stef as her driver, and Alyc and I agreed afterward that the banter as Stef coaxed Big Frieda into cooperation was worth a whole chunk of the ticket price on its own. Along with, y’know, getting to sit as we rattled around the Quarter, dodging the pedestrian tours and the drunks on Bourbon Street.

Day Two was where things went full Gabriel Knight. We started out with a scheduled tour in St. Louis Cemetery #1, the one where Marie Laveau is buried — complete with markings on the side of her tomb, despite the best efforts of cemetery staff to prevent that sort of thing. Then it was south into the Quarter, me stopping frequently to get various shots of the balconies with their cascading flowers and greenery, to Napoleon House. After lunch there, we wanted to visit a pharmaceutical museum just a few doors down that has nothing to do with the game but looked interesting to me; sadly, it was closed on Mondays. Instead we continued on into Jackson Square (where there were no bands playing “When the Saints Go Marching In,” but I sang it to myself for nostalgia’s sake), into the cathedral (no dead bodies in the pews, fortunately), and to a nearby voodoo museum, where no snakes tried to kill me. I did, however, buy a “Christmas ornament” there, continuing the family tradition of decorating our trees with whatever we can hang on a branch. In this case, that’s a snake pendant. We finished out the day with a jaunt to the Garden District; I can’t recall whether the game says that’s where the Gedde house stands, but I did at least get to see a selection of suitably lovely old mansions. I think the only major game-related marks I missed were Tulane University and the bayou itself; we would have needed another day for a proper sightseeing visit out there.

So what did I think of New Orleans?

Well, we picked a good time to visit. In early November, the heat isn’t quite as brutal, and by then the Halloween crowds are gone. It might be interesting to come back some time for Mardi Gras, but only if I can make good enough arrangements for where to stay and where to watch the parades from, because I don’t have it in me to wade through spilled beer to the knee just to get some good photos. The Quarter is indeed damned photogenic on its own, though: one of our local friends quoted to us the Tennessee Williams line about how “America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.” There’s some truth to that, in terms of distinctive architecture (though I’ll defend Boston as being fairly recognizable, too).

Alyc and I also had discussions about the ways in which the Quarter reminds us of the Old Island in the Rook and Rose books, what with sitting in a river delta, being in many ways shabby and run-down, but also still holding some important official sites; we passed the Louisiana Supreme Court on our way to Napoleon House. In some cities the historic district is all but depopulated, given over to tourism and hotels or other forms of business, but the Quarter is very much still lived in.

The food, I will admit, is a bit wasted on me. Not only do I not cope well with spiciness, but these days I live in another, very different food mecca; by the time my week there was done, I was really craving something green. But beignets are indeed delicious — I’ve had beignets here in California, but it’s different getting them from their homeland — and even though I’m not a coffee drinker, I did enjoy dunking them in Alyc’s cafe au lait. Even had some chicory coffee, for which my opinion was that it’s pretty much like regular coffee: in both cases I don’t want to drink it unless it’s so heavily doctored with milk and sugar that it’s barely the original product anymore. Amusingly, I managed to snag a Lucky Dog at the airport on my way out, adding one more last-minute tick mark to my game nostalgia.

I am very glad we took the extra time. For a couple of days at WFC, I had this vague, dissatisfied feeling about the trip: sure, I was in New Orleans, but despite venturing out of the hotel for meals, it didn’t really feel like I’d gone anywhere. The con was in the Central Business District, which is much more generic in its atmosphere. Once we had the chance to really commit to sightseeing, though, I got a dose of what I’ve been lacking since the pandemic began: the experience of going somewhere new, somewhere different, feeding my brain with sights and sounds it’s never tasted before.

I have really, really missed that.

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Another SMT sale!

Signing a contract makes a thing official, right? Right! I am delighted to say I’ll have another story in Sunday Morning Transport: “At the Heart of Each Pearl Lies a Grain of Sand,” based on a tale out of the Thousand and One Nights. It will be out some time next year!

And while I’m at it, I should mention that you can read some of SMT’s stories for free — I believe the pattern is that the first story each month is publicly available, and then the remainder (one per week, on Sunday, as you might suspect), are paywalled. As my contributor status means I get a subscription, I can vouch for them publishing a fantastic range of SF/F; if you have not checked them out yet, go take a look!

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New Worlds: The Water We Swim In

The New Worlds Patreon continues its look at the parts of our world we almost never think about, just like fish don’t think about the water we swim in: everything from ask vs. guess to interpersonal distance to emotional display. Comment over there!

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New Worlds: The Individual vs. the Collective

The Topic Builders of the New Worlds Patreon have voted, and so for November, we will be looking at some of the more abstract, ideological aspects of worldbuilding. First up: individualism and communalism. Comment over there!

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Books read, October 2022

This list looks way more impressive than it really is; many of the things I read this month were novella-length or shorter. But still, it feels gratifying!

Half World, Hiromi Goto. The premise of this one is pretty standard: a teenage girl who suffers from isolation at school discovers her mother and unknown father actually come from a magical realm — in this case, Half World, midway between the realms of Flesh and Spirit — and she is destined to save it. The execution of that premise, however, very much lifts it out of the stereotypes of its own plot. Half World used to be part of a cycle between the realms that kept the worlds in balance, but since that cycle was broken, the people there are trapped in reliving the nightmares of their own deaths. The way Melanie resolves that issue is very well-done, as are the characters who help her along the way — often in their own ways, not the ones Melanie expects or wants.

A Thousand Li: The Second Sect, Tao Wong. Fifth book in this cultivation series, with the protagonist struggling to recover from the metaphysical wounds he took in the previous volume. That aspect of the story pinged hard on the disability radar for me: on the one hand this is a cure narrative, since Wu Ying does succeed in fully recovering, but on the other hand, the way he gets there strongly resembles the “radical acceptance” mentality I’ve seen advocated by many disability activists. I quite liked that element and how it was handled here.

As the Tide Came Flowing In, Sonya Taaffe. Disclosure: the author is a friend. I said to her, and will repeat here, that I’m not sure I will ever know and love any single thing as deeply as she knows and loves the sea. That’s the thematic thread binding together the poetic and fictional contents of this tiny little collection, and it’s lovely.

The Best Thing You Can Steal, Simon R. Green. Novella or short novel, urban fantasy heist. It was . . . okay, I guess? I was a little disappointed because the cover copy promised that the protagonist “specializes in stealing the kind of things that can’t normally be stolen. Like a ghost’s clothes, or a photo from a country that never existed. He even stole his current identity.” But what he aims to steal here is a magical artifact, which — magical-ness aside — is a perfectly ordinary target.

The Dybbuk in Love, Sonya Taaffe. Disclosure: the author is still a friend. This is an older piece, maybe novelette in length?, that looks at the usual kind of dybbuk story from a different angle. Lovely again, just not about the sea this time.

For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink and Changed History, Sarah Rose. I knew this was a thing, but this book made it clear in a way I’d never quite grokked just how Big Business tea was in the nineteenth century, and why it was worth a massive effort to steal tea seeds, living tea plants, and (not steal but hire, albeit for shit wages) people who knew what to do with them. I appreciate that Rose did her absolute best, within the confines of the historical record we have, to take into account the perspectives and motivations of the Chinese people Robert Fortune was dealing with; what Fortune saw as betrayal by men he’d hired to assist him was probably just them pursuing their own interests in a perfectly rational way.

The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe, Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry, narr. Jim Meskimen. It took me a surprisingly long time for me to get my brain to accept what it was listening to, i.e. just what it says on the tin: a history. So much of what I read these days is more narrowly topic-focused that I kept expecting a more central thread than this book really has. To the extent that there is such a thing, it’s that the so-called Dark Ages were “brighter” than popular narrative would have you believe, but I have to admit, the authors’ attempt to rebrand that period as “the Bright Ages” kept inducing a “stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen” reaction in me. (Especially whenever they swung from “the period was bright because there was so much diversity and curiosity!” to “but uh sometimes the brightness was from the fires of sacked cities!”) I did, however, very much appreciate their determined persistence in paying attention to the presence and experiences of women and minorities, and in calling out oppressive structures like slavery wherever they appear.

The Holver Alley Crew, Marshall Ryan Maresca. Another in Maresca’s Maradaine mega-series, which is akin to the MCU in having multiple narrative strands that sometimes run independently and sometimes bounce off each other. This one follows a group of criminals who seek money and justice, in variable order, after someone arranges for their street to burn down. I really like the older woman who operates as one of the bigger local crime bosses — she’s just the right amounts of ruthless and sympathetic.

The Feast, Randy Lee Eickhoff. Another in his set (I have two more to go) of Old Irish literature translation/retelling/whatevers, this one of Fled Bricriu. Oh my god the unwillingness of the central characters to accept as valid the results of any contest that doesn’t result in them winning — over and over and OVER again. That part’s on the ancient Irish storytellers, not Eickhoff; the part that is on him is a style of writing that I’ve seen Rachel Manija Brown mock as “she breasted boobily down the stairs.” I get that he’s trying to represent the earthiness of Old Irish literature, but my dude, this is not the way to do it: I have never once in my life seen a woman’s breasts twitch in indignation.

The Spirit Rebellion, Rachel Aaron. Second of the Eli Monpress series (I have the first three in an omnibus, but I’m counting them separately for tracking and blogging purposes). The metaphysics that give basically everything a spirit do raise some unanswered questions about how food, clothing, housing, and so forth work in this society, but you know, I’m willing to let that go in exchange for sentences about how a dangerous spirit leaves in its wake “the terrified silence of traumatized crates.” And the personification of objects pays off delightfully at the climax.

Tiger Honor, Yoon Ha Lee. Second of his Thousand Worlds MG space fantasy series; it doesn’t require reading the first book, since this one has a different protagonist, but it probably carries more impact if you’ve seen what’s treated as backstory here play out in full. I loved watching Sebin struggle with the tension between family obligation, organizational duty, and their own sense of what’s right. This series remains, along with Hernandez’ Sal and Gabi books, my favorite stuff by far from the Rick Riordan Presents imprint.

Heaven Official’s Blessing, Vol. 3, Mo Xiang Tong Xiu. I really wish the company putting these out went more for “narrative shape” in choosing where to put the boundaries between volumes, rather than “more or less consistent page count.” This one opens up in the middle of a flashback I’d forgotten was underway, and you spend like half the book there before flashing back to the present day. I did, however, really like the Blessing Festival and the lantern contest. And although I usually find the modern, colloquial tone often used in the translation rather jarring, it paid off entertainingly when it mentioned the plays about Hua Cheng usually being titled things like “The Red Demon Torched the Temples of Thirty-Three Gods and the Heavens Could Do Fuck-All About It, or Crimson Rain Sought Flower Strung Up the Martial and Civil Gods and Slapped Them Around With But One Hand.”

The Fox’s Wedding, Matthew Meyer This is the guy behind yokai.com, who periodically puts out collections of yōkai folklore complete with his own woodblock-style art. I backed this fourth collection through Kickstarter, but it’s also available for purchase, and I highly recommend his books if you’re interested in the topic.

Mazirian the Magician, Jack Vance. A.K.A. the book more commonly known as The Dying Earth. I don’t know why Mazirian the Magician was apparently Vance’s preferred title; that’s the name of one of the stories in here, but Mazirian is not an ongoing character or anything. Anyway, this is a classic that famously inspired the “prepared spellcasting” approach seen in Dungeons & Dragons; with that context, it’s kind of hilarious to see how a supremely powerful wizard might be able to prepare as many as FIVE SPELLS. Gasp! Awe! (But their spells appear to be significantly more flexible than D&D examples, and also of course Vance could arrange for them to memorize ones that would actually be useful in the plot.)

What I found particularly interesting here was the female characters. They’re . . . not great by modern standards, but they’re significantly better than I expected them to be? I particularly noted, and enjoyed, the multiple instances where a male character gets the hots for a female one, pursues her in a kind of rapey way, and then gets straight-up murdered by or at least via the actions of his ostensible target. So their behavior, while not great, is also clearly not rewarded. (Really, almost nobody here is a good person. But there’s plenty of room for me to at least imagine some good interiority and agency for most of the women.)

Where Dreams Descend, Janella Angeles, narr. Imani Jade Powers and Steve West. I didn’t finish this one, but it’s not a DNF in the sense the internet tends to use that term; I would have gone to the end if I hadn’t been forced to return the audiobook to the library. However, I don’t think I care quite enough to check it out again later. Since I got more than three-quarters of the way through, though, I decided to go ahead and include it in this post. (Most of the time, the books I don’t finish get dropped very early on, and I don’t blog about those.)

There was a lot of really intriguing material in this one. Unfortunately — and this is why I’m not going to check it out again — by the three-quarters mark, it was very clear that much of that material wasn’t really going to go anywhere until the second book of the duology. The maybe-curse on Glorian, the city’s history with its four founding houses, the possibility of secret magic there, Hellfire House and what it’s doing out in the forest, Demarco’s ostensible purpose in having come to Glorian (a purpose he seems to largely neglect), Jack’s true nature, the Conquering Circus, the sealing of the city gates, even whatever it is that’s vanishing or striking down Kallia’s competitors . . . all of that would flicker up periodically to remind me it was there, but in the meanwhile the book spent vastly more time and attention on the relationship between Kallia and Demarco, the intermittent appearances of Jack, and the playing-out of the competition, complete with a lot of instances of the judges being sexist asshats. None of which was badly done, I’d say — the competition managed to avoid the “Hunger Games clone” feel a lot of contest-focused YA novels give off, and right before my stopping point the book suddenly introduced the possibility that there’s an active conspiracy or curse against female magicians — but I got tired of waiting for all those other things to get the attention I felt they deserved. Even if they surge into prominence in the last quarter, rather than waiting for book two, it would feel like too little, too late. Which is a pity, because they did seem interesting! (If anybody has read this and/or its sequel, I am not averse to spoilers in the comments; I’d love to know what other people thought.)

The narration of the audiobook was good, though; Powers did an excellent job of differentiating the characters. West only narrates a few very brief sections about Jack, which were fine.

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New Worlds: Political Patronage

The New Worlds Patreon is always ready to do a favor for a friend . . . so long as it gets one in return. To close out October, we’re looking at political patronage: comment over there!

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