Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 39

not a checklist

I was just realizing that two of my friends here on Dreamwidth are building little miniature scenes. "Huh," I thought to myself. "That's an interesting coincidence." [the joke will be on me as it turns out that ALL my friends on Dreamwidth are building little miniature scenes]

Then I thought, "Wow, come to think of it, they also both can tell horrifying and yet entertaining stories of their childhood--that's something else they have in common. And they both enjoy gardening. And they're both write...

Little White Duck: A Childhood in China

Little White Duck: A Childhood in China, by Na Liu (text) and her husband Andrés Vera Martínez (art), is a collection of seven vignettes, done graphic-novel style, from the author's childhood. She was born in 1973 in Wuhan, China. Eventually she came to the United States, and now she's a doctor of hematology and oncology. She wanted to make this book to tell her daughter what life was like in China in that era, and I found it so engrossing that I sat in my car, reading it, after having picked it...

a flower and a knife

Have a jasmine flower. You can stand beside it and feel sultry in a tiny way.




A knife (no photo)

There is a knife in my knife drawer that has a vendetta against me. We were mortal enemies in a previous life, I guess: I must have been a fool who blunted it, using it to cut willow switches or to carve my initials in a beech tree, or maybe I was a careless crafter who ruined it with glue, or maybe I foiled the schemes of the person whose grip around its handle it loved best in all the world---in any ...

I am ... I have been

I always love poems and incantations that take the form, "I am the [thing] that ..." Just now I encountered something purporting to be from something called the Hymn of Sekhmet that has these lines:

I am the broken wax seal on my lover’s letters.
I am the phoenix, the fiery sun, consuming and resuming myself.

And it reminded me of the song of Amergin:

"I am the wind on the sea;
I am the wave of the sea;
I am the bull of seven battles;
I am the eagle on the rock
I am a flash from the sun;
I am the most b...

Kiku to Isamu

This remarkable movie, Kiku to Isamu, is about the lives of biracial siblings, older sister Kiku and younger brother Isamu, being raised by their frail grandmother deep in the Japanese countryside. It was made in 1959 and is an amazingly clear-eyed, unsentimental depiction of Japanese prejudice--that also contains a stinging indictment of American racism. People keep telling the old granny that she should see about getting the kids adopted through a program that brings the offspring of Japanese ...

Short Story: "The Curious Case of the Cave Salamander"

"The Curious Case of the Cave Salamander," by Gwen C. Katz, in the February 2021 issue of Utopia Science Fiction

In this absolutely delightful, funny, and clever story, scientist Jen has discovered** a new species of tiny salamander, and it's completely adorable:

The internet did indeed love the ostolotl. The six-inch salamander had enormous round eyes, a mouth like a puppy, fluorescent blue stripes, and fluffy gills sprouting from the sides of its face. There was fan art. There were uwu ostolotl ...

a coat of arms

The Diocese of Springfield, MA, has a new bishop, and bishops apparently get ecclesiastical coats of arms. ("They are princes of the church," Wakanomori said. "Their residences are called palaces." I wonder if that's even true in Springfield...)

The new bishop's coat of arms, as best as we could tell, seeing it via a televised Mass, looked like it was designed by a very imaginative child.

"Is that a rocket ship on the right?" I asked Wakanomori.

"Maybe it's a very thin castle?" he suggested in r...

Intoxicating fun

Well the reading yesterday was tremendous fun for me, the reader--I think in very large part because I was reading with Claire, who can come to a thing so alight with joy and energy it's impossible not to respond. I fall in love every time I'm around her.

The other very large part of the joy was all the friends I got to see, and who I got to introduce--sort of, as best you can with Zoom--to one another. I got to hear the voices of people I've only ever known through text before! And I got to see ...

Lagoonfire reading excerpts

If you're coming to the reading and want to have a text to follow along with, I've made a PDF of just the readings, and I believe--I hope and think--that you can download it * here *. (If not just let me know and I'll email the PDF to you.)

comments

a couple of interview links

I promise it won't be all Lagoonfire all the time for that much longer. However! If you want to know more about the world, here are links to two interviews:

~ One with sartorias , here (thank you sartorias !), and...

~ One at Nerds of a Feather, with Andrea Johnson, here .

Both people have been amazingly supportive from the time I (re)started writing as an adult. As a guest editor of a YA zine of brief existence, Sherwood published my first short story, and both she and Andrea helped me reach out to...