Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 122

October 2: On this day in Pen Pal

On this day in Pen Pal, Kaya wrote to Em and told her it was too dangerous to continue the correspondence--from this point, the story enters a new stage. There won't be more posts between now and the day the story ends, but at the end I have an idea for a special post. And I might post something between then and now, if something occurs to me.

Meanwhile, here are neither lava nor waves, and yet it might be both:

The crest of the wave, on fire

It's not foam on the crests of the waves in the sky ocean tonight: it's fire. White-hot fire licking the edge of the long wave as it breaks on . . . what shores do the sky waves break on?

Alterations and transformations

Editor John Benson calls issue 52 of Not One of Us the alternative issue. Things aren't as they seem, or get overwritten or undone, there are shatterings and fires and renewals. I love the attention John has paid to what goes where--which poems go together, and before or after which stories, and which stories abut.

I'm self-interested in writing about this issue, because I have a story in it--and truly, I wanted to write about issue 51, which has a beautifully creepy story by Mat Joiner in it...

October 1: spontaneous ceremony

On this day in Pen Pal, Kaya took an action to express grief. You might say she created a spontaneous ceremony.

I think people do this a lot. Prescribed rituals do give us a way to proclaim and honor our big feelings (the happy ones as well as the sad ones), but sometimes they're not enough; sometimes we need or want to go further. We want to make a personal statement. Or, like Kaya, we may not be in a position to engage in prescribed rituals.

Do you have any spontaneous ceremonies you've creat...

Floating Schools

Jaspreet was showing me IRIN videos that somehow I hadn't found on my own, including a whole series relating to climate change (including one focusing on Bangladesh's floating gardens, which I hadn't realized are a generations-old tradition in some areas).

And--you know how in the Philippines there are school bus boats (that I wrote about here)? Well in Bangladesh there are actual floating boat-schools, which allow children to continue their education uninterrupted by the monsoon season. They'...

So many stories

Jaspreet Kindra shared so many stories, both wonderful and harrowing, while she was over, some of which, with permission, I'll share, but one thing I'll just quickly observe:

two out of two journalists whom I've made friends with via the Internet (Jaspreet being one, Glenn Cheney being the other) have had their lives threatened in the course of their work, and two out of two of them have stood up to the powerful to protect the weak.

It's an honor to know these guys.

Thanks for all you do, journa...

Scarce today and tomorrow

Today I'm meeting my first ever made-on-Twitter friend, Jaspreet Kindra, who just so happens to be an award-winning journalist, writing on climate change and its effects on developing countries, among other things. I am so lucky: The world is full of so many wonderful people, and I sometimes get to meet them.

I'll be back to read your pages sometime late on Sunday or Monday. Meanwhile, here is a door to someplace golden.

dystopias from on top and below

osprey_archer has some interesting thoughts on The Giver (book, not movie) here, and what she said about the coziness of the society got me thinking about how there are, broadly speaking, two perspectives stories generally take on a dystopic society. Either the protagonist starts out as one of the happy crowd--maybe a member of an elite minority, or maybe a member of a relatively well-managed majority--or else they start out as a member of the (or an, if there's more than one) oppressed group...

Something big and something small

The waves of the sky ocean:



And a rich-brown acorn in its hand-knitted hat:

Messenger birds and poisonous exhalations

On September 21–22 in Pen Pal, Kaya first started using her crow Sumi to carry messages. Although crows are messenger birds in many mythologies, they're not actually used as couriers in real life, not regularly anyway--pigeons are. People all over the world enjoy keeping homing pigeons (including in my town: I got a tour of a dovecote some years back--picture here); pigeons were used to deliver mail in India into the 2000s; and China still keeps military homing pigeons as a safeguard in the e...