'Nathan Burgoine's Blog, page 44

Short Stories 366:156 — “Lockwood,” by Bryan Washington

[image error]One of the discussions I’ve had multiple times with editors and authors of anthologies and collections is how they choose the order of the tales in the completed work. The first story has to carry so much weight. It’s not just its own story, it also serves as an introduction to the collection or anthology itself, carrying tone and theme and—hopefully—draws the reader to keep going. “Lockwood” felt like a master class in this, and opens Lot, Bryan Washington’s collection, with such an impact.

“Lockwood” gives us the lens of a young man to look through, and his blunt but not cruel declarative views of his neighbours—who don’t have papers—and his relationship with the neighbour’s son, Roberto. We watch him as he sees his father angry that his mother is passing food, and we’re with him when he and Roberto talk, and cross lines, and move from talking to touching. They steal moments together, often hurried, often out and about in Houston, and the fragility of it brims to the surface throughout the story. And then, Roberto’s family is just gone, and we have only the briefest moment of time with the narrator to settle how he feels about it, and some haunting words from earlier in the story about Roberto’s thoughts on home.

Ultimately, “Lockwood” had me ready to dive into the next story immediately. I nabbed this collection because it was shortlisted for the gay fiction Lammy (which it won!), and I am so glad I grabbed it. If you’re looking for more queer short fiction—and especially queer short fiction by and about queer people of colour—I heartily suggest you pick up a copy for yourself.

Short Stories 366:155 — “The Husband Stitch,” by Carmen Maria Machado

[image error]Holy flying crap, this was incredible. Carmen Maria Machado opens Her Body and Other Parties with “The Husband Stitch,” with an unnamed narrator explaining she is a storyteller, and, early on in the tale, there’s a part where this young woman is exploring her sexuality without apology, clearly stating her demands, and the line—I listened to this on audio, so forgive me if I get a word or two wrong here—is something like, “I’ve heard all of the stories about girls like me and am unafraid to make more of them.” I scribbled it down on my phone, and by the end of the tale, that was the line I kept going back to.

There’s a sliver of something “other” running through this story, which is often broken up by instructions on how to read it aloud, and also small segues of intertextual mentions of other fairy tales or folk stories or urban myths. And there are the ribbons: the narrator wears one around her neck, tied at the back in a bow. Another woman has one around her foot. Another her finger. These ribbons exist, are mentioned, sometimes cause issues or frustrations or are central to moments of tension, but then the narrative flows onward. The unnamed woman with the neck ribbon marries a man she is truly drawn to and connected with, has a child she raises well, recovers from surgery, explores sensuality and sexuality, meets other women, tells stories—but never allows her husband to touch the ribbon, and never explains the ribbon.

The final moments of this story are flipping brilliant. The notion of someone wanting all of someone else, of not allowing even a sliver of silence or secret or the personal, is unfolded with such tension that I caught myself slowing my steps while I walked the dog, wanting to be still while I listened (he didn’t agree, and he pulled me onward, but I looped an extra time around the block to let the scene settle). This world, the narrator’s world, which was our world, with people so very recognizable in it, but, oh, also these ribbons, was so deft. I’m so glad a friend recommended this collection to me.

Short Stories 366:154 — “In Search of Stars,” by Matthew Bright

[image error]I adore Matthew Bright, which is likely no secret to anyone around this blog. First off, he’s a fantastic editor (Threesome, The Myriad Carnival, Clockwork Cairo, and Gents). Second? He’s the talent behind some of my favourite covers, via Inkspiral Design. Third? He’s a fantastic author (especially of the fantastical).

Last year, he released his first collection, Stories to Sing in the Dark, and I was lucky enough to get an ARC, so I was reading this book long before most others and yes, I’m gloating, and yes, it’s just that freaking good.

“In Search of Stars” is one of those stories, and it struck me as so brilliantly apropos for Pride Month. We meet a man who is eyeing a door and trying to decide if he has the guts to go through, or if there’s a password, or what, exactly, it’ll take to make it across that threshold. This is such a queer moment, I cannot tell you.

Against this comes Bright’s wonderful trace of the fantastical, as the man picks up a trick, and then paints the trick (I don’t mean on a canvas here, but rather bodily painting the man in question) and things take a turn for the odd—and not for the better of the trick in question—but in a melancholy, magical, and wonderfully aching way that I just freaking adored. This set-up (which I refuse to spoil) repeats and repeats again, including for the finale of the tale, and by the time it was done I was just sort of sitting back and exhaling.

It isn’t a happy tale, but somehow it still has a sense of triumph to it, and sometimes I just love an aching triumph.

From the Author:

Somewhere after I wrote a Dorian-Gray-lives-through-the-AIDS era I decided to write a collection of stories taking Victorian sf characters and transposing them into queer stories through the century. I had several planned (Peter Pan and the Lost Boys in WW1 trenches; the Bride of Frankenstein modelling for Warhol…) and this is the only one I completed. I took an obscure French story in which a scientist invents gravity-resistant paint, and combined it with a recent experience going to a modern day speakeasy in which there was a secret entrance through the toilets (except we had our info wrong so ended up just several confused men in a toilet cubicle.) This story is my personal high-score for close-thing rejections before it was finally published – it made it to multiple final rounds, tantalising me through thirteen rounds of submission, before eventually finding a loving home with Glittership.

You can find Matthew Bright online at his website.

Short Stories 366:153 — “September Song,” by Raymond Luczak

[image error]Happy Pride Month! As is likely clear by now, I have an anthology and collection purchasing problem. I adore short fiction (again, super clear by now) and especially I love finding new voices by reading queer anthologies, and as such there are more than a few queer anthologies and collections on my shelf that I’m going to attempt to highlight this month. And I’m going to start with a circus.

The Myriad Carnival, edited by the fantastic Matthew Bright, opens with Raymond Luczak’s incredibly gentle “September Song.” Written in second person present tense, it’s got an immediacy and emotionality that drew me in right from the get-go, and spins a tale of a son aware of his differences, who watches his family fade into shards and be reforged, loses friends (and first crushes) and finds a life of transience in the form of being a roadie for the titular Myriad Carnival, and ultimately realizes how he’s lived a life a step removed when he has a moment of seeing and being seen.

In someone else’s hands, this story could have felt maudlin, or tipped too far to one side of bittersweet and felt like an ultimately broken story of a life discovered too late, but instead, Luczak evokes enough hope to leave a sense of beginning in the end of the story, and weaves that hope into a pattern just clear enough to grant a hazy vision of possibility. The end result is a warm, welcoming start to the anthology.

Short Stories 366:152 — “No Honor Among Thieves,” by Heidi Hunter

[image error]I’m really enjoying my trips through time with Crime Travel (an anthology of crime stories connected by a theme of time travel), and this latest trip from Heidi Hunter had a couple of nifty twists along the path to keep the reader guessing. It’s also got a killer opening line: “It was the sledgehammer in his left hand that told me it wasn’t going to be our usual Saturday Night.”

What follows is a very unusual Saturday Night for Joanna, who is dragged more-or-less willingly to her friend Anthony’s target: a home one of his dead relatives once owned, in which the local stories say is hidden a big-freaking-gem. She doesn’t really believe it, and points out that everyone involved with the hiding of said gem was either gunned down at the expensive party where it was intended to be fenced, or is just long gone (likely one of those people have the gem), but the house is about to be demolished, and Anthony, like many people in their home town, is desperate and out of cash.

What follows is a “fold in time” kind of story, where Joanna somehow accidentally steps through a curtain in time and ends up at the house in its glory, when the crime-syndicate family were in their prime, and everyone is dressed up for a party. Then she realizes it’s that party, where everyone ends up dead in a hail of bullets, and has to balance surviving, figuring out how to get back to her own time, and—just maybe—how to get her hands on a big-freaking-gem. As I said, the final few moments in the story (complete with a one-two twist) are really enjoyable, and I decided I liked Joanna very much.

Short Stories 366:151 — “The Sacrifice of Pawns,” by Mark Ladouceur

[image error]I’m not sure how to approach this particular story without semi-spoilers (consider yourself warned), and it’s further complicated by the format of this particular anthology. The Clan Chronicles: Tales from Plexis is a shared-world anthology taking place in Julie Czerneda’s Clan Chronicles universe, and takes side characters from said world, places them into the hands of other authors, and the result is stories that most of the time could easily be read as stand alone tales without worry. Mark Ladouceur’s story is one of the few where the entire tone of the story changes if you go in knowing information from the Trade Pact universe, however, as the fate of the character in question is already set in stone within Czerneda’s A Thousand Words for Stranger.

So. On the one hand, if you go in without foreknowledge, you’ve got a story about Kurr di Sarc, an archeologist tasked with figuring out what happened to a destroyed ship with potential survivors, who is balancing this search with missing his partner (who is expecting). He wants to find out what happened to the ship since she had relatives aboard, but he also really wants to go be with her, but he’s a solver of puzzles and likes mysteries, so off he goes to Plexis to begin his search. What follows is a mystery, with cat-and-mouse elements, as Kurr realizes things aren’t quite what they seem, and there are powerful people he might need to consider responsible—and has an ending that’ll punch all the harder (and definitely is the first story to end in such a way in the anthology), which can be all the more surprising.

On the other hand? If you know what happens to Kurr di Sarc already, then instead the story isn’t one of mystery so much as it’s… well… an inevitable dark tale that fills in some gaps with tragedy and sorrow. Definitely not a pick-me-up story, this one doesn’t offer glimmers of hope internal to its own story, and it’s only knowing the rest of the series as a reader that I could draw that spark of vengeance and justice for myself as a reader. Either way, the story is really well-written and delivers that punch with full effect, but it’s definitely the first in the anthology to go in such a cruel direction.

Short Stories 366:150 — “The Book of Martha,” by Octavia Butler

[image error]Oh wow. From Year’s Best Fantasy 4, a delightful find in an old paperback I picked up on vacation on a rainy day, this story has so very much going on in it, but is at its core just a conversation between Martha, a writer, and God. She’s just somehow, suddenly, standing there with God. And God has a very big request: God wants Martha to help fix humanity. Or buy it more time. Or something. God isn’t very clear about a lot of things, and Martha is just doing her best here, but, yeah. It’s a strange moment and Martha isn’t completely convinced at first that she hasn’t just lost her mind.

Instead, Martha ends up floating some ideas past God, and as God evolves and changes (Martha’s conceptions are colouring her vision of God and everything around her, so there’s a wonderful progression of Martha slowly coming to be at peace with hanging out with, y’know, God as God shifts from being this large archetype to someone she feels the urge to hug by the story’s end.) Her ideas start out with population control, to which she quickly realizes the problems, and then shifts to another avenue that struck me as so very much a thing a writer would suggest.

“The Book of Martha” ends without knowing what will happen to humanity, and I’m glad. This is a story about one character, one woman, faced with an impossible decision, and her coming up with an answer that she hopes will do the least harm and the most good. It’s a great piece (which I suppose shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s read Octavia Butler, really), and I’m so glad I randomly bumped into it by random chance, thanks to a rainy day on a vacation, and a used bookstore.

Keeping Up Appearances

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Max says “hi!” and also offers life advice and would like treats, please.

Hello from social distancing! I hope you’re all doing as well as can be expected in these topsy-turvy times, and that life is giving you as many breaks as it can from this ongoing anxiety and pressure. If you’re feeling a little down about the lack of conventions and Pride (totally valid to feel that way, even knowing it’s the right thing to do), I have what I hope is some good news for the next few weeks.

As an author, one of the most awesome things you sometimes get to do is conventions, retreats, and events. Gathering with other authors and with readers—and, in my case, other queer authors and queer readers especially—is an amazing feeling. That 2020 seemed bound and determined to cancel everything (again, for good reasons), it’s hard not to feel down about it. But technology can be wonderful, and in fact, thanks to technology, I’ve been able to “attend” more conferences and events than I could have in a non-digital sense.

And a bunch of them are coming up over the next two weekends.

Romancing the Capital

I missed the last Romancing the Capital, hosted by the wonderful Eve Langlais, and I’m delighted to be taking part in a couple of panels for the ongoing digital events the RTC people have been putting together this year. Saturday, May 30th, I’m going to be taking part in two panels: one on Christmas Romance, from 1:30 pm to 2:30 pm, and one on Queer Representation in Romance, from 3:00 pm to 4:00 pm. You can find all the information you need to watch here.

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Spoiled for Choices

After RTC, I’ve got one heck of a weekend coming up on Saturday June 6th and Sunday June 7th, as both the Bold Strokes Books UK Bookathon and the Renaissance Press Virtual Conference are happening at the same time, but thanks to the wonders of technology (and a five hour time difference), this means I can attend both. Unexpected upside for the win!

The Renaissance Press Virtual Conference

[image error]The Renaissance Press Virtual Conference is a free virtual conference, hosted by Presses Renaissance Press! There will be readings, panels, an online vendor room, and more. The events will be held from the evening of Friday, June 5th through to Sunday 7th, 2020. You do need to register, and early is better because spots are limited.

I’ll be popping up in two places: At noon on Saturday June 6th, I’m on “Bury Your Tropes,” talking some harmful tropes, and why they cause harm. Our goal is to call out harmful tropes and offer a different story path. If you’ve heard me talk on the subject at all before, you’ve likely heard me talk about some of the queer tropes in specific, but this panel is taking a much wider approach than I usually get to talk about. I can’t wait.

Then, on Sunday June 7th, at 10:30 am, I’m taking part in “Literary and Genre Fiction: Can’t We All Just Get Along?” Why is there a divide between literary and genre fiction, and between certain fiction genres? What can we do to celebrate all fiction? Is cross-genre fiction changing this? I can’t wait to find out the answers to these questions, which I assume the other panelists all have.

Short Stories 366:149 — “Glory,” by Lesley Nneka Arimah

[image error]The idea of someone “cursed” or shrouded in bad luck is brought rather delightfully to life here in this latest story from Lesley Nneka Arimah’s What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky, and I have to say despite her being prickly and borderline cruel and careless, I was rooting for Glory from step one, when she was fighting with Facebook because Facebook wouldn’t believe her that her name was actually a full statement professing glory to God, even once she’d attached copies of legal documentation. I have a friend named Bambi. This is so not out of the realm of reality.

Glory’s grandfather proclaimed this shroud of ill fortune, and from there it seems to have settled in quite well. Glory, when presented with a choice, has the uncanny ability to choose the wrong thing. Doesn’t matter if she knows what’s better, or can verbalize why, she just ends up on the wrong side of every decision. Now, this doesn’t absolve her as a character, as it becomes clear throughout the story that she’s aware and conscious of her direction, and she deflects and lies and is so embittered by the way chance works against her that she’s certainly not blameless, but she’s still such an engrossing character. And then she meets a man who seems to be very much her opposite. Lucky. Graceful. Casually successful.

It’s when they begin to date that Glory really starts to consider what it is to be born so unlucky, and whether or not it’s possible to trick the gods who’ve frowned upon her. The cumulation of the story—she meet’s the man’s mother—and the very last lines of the story are so wonderfully written that I didn’t even mind the story’s ambiguous ending (which, on thought, both can and can’t be ambiguous, given all we’ve learned about Glory so far, but painted instead from the reader’s perspective because she’s in a situation where ‘what’s the right thing to do?’ is buried deeply in one’s own judgement). Honestly, it’s a great character story in so many ways.

Short Stories 366:148 — “Oliver Gutierrez and the Walking Stick of Destiny,” by Elliott Dunstan

[image error]There’s this thing that happens way, way too often in fiction where marginalized characters get to have one crack at the list. There can be the white lesbian, and the black woman, and the Deaf kid, and so on, but a Deaf black lesbian? Suddenly reviews fill up with mentions of “too much” or “unbelievable” or the like, when instead the reality is that, well, to follow my own example there, Deaf black lesbians exist. And so they should also appear in fiction.

If that seems like an odd rambling introduction to a short story, understand it was one of the reasons I had my fist in the air when I was reading Elliott Dunstan’s story for the first time: Oliver Gutierrez is deaf, and bipolar, and queer and it’s all so damn pitch-perfect and wonderful and real that, well, as I said: fist was in the air. That Oliver is having a really, really rough week: a new diagnosis to add to list of ways xe isn’t “normal” has left Oliver feeling all the more off. Walking is painful, and while there’s a cane in the corner that could maybe help, the cane also just started talking (and sounds a lot like Julie Andrews) and Oliver isn’t sure xe’s up to the challenge right now.

There’s a wonderful juggling act between the lived reality, the all-too-familiar self-deprecating humour, and the strengths found in difference in “Oliver Gutierrez and the Walking Stick of Destiny.” I think it’s a juggling act I noticed many, many times in Nothing Without Us, and honestly “Oliver” was the sort of story I loved the most in the book: a slice of day-in-the-life from an angle we should see so much more often, but don’t. I mentioned loving Elliott Dunstan’s work before, in Scourge of the Seas of Time (and Space), and I’m so glad to find more.