Ada Hoffmann's Blog, page 27

MONSTERS IN MY MIND: Story notes, part 35 and 36

35. An Operatic Tour of New Jersey, With Raptors

The Apocalypse begins when Diego sings Count Almaviva in “The Barber of Seville” in Dover, New Jersey. He doesn’t notice anything wrong until after the curtain call, when he steps out of the Baker Theater onto West Blackwell Street, struggling to balance the three bouquets of roses in his arms, and walks into a horde of running, screaming people, pursued by a Tyrannosaurus.

I wrote most of this story in a single day in the spring of 2013. I loved the concept so much that, once I had enough to write the title down, the rest of the draft just flowed. (Which is not to say it didn’t need edits – it very much did!)

I can’t take credit for the idea. Someone on Twitter – I no longer remember who – wrote that they were tired of zombie apocalypses and wanted a velociraptor apocalypse. I wrote one. (With paleontologically accurate velociraptors – small, feathered, etc. And a lot of other dinosaurs to boot.) The protagonist is an opera singer who, following the apocalypse, sets out to sing in every opera house that he can.

The protagonist of “An Operatic Tour of New Jersey, With Raptors” is named Diego – and his unfortunately deceased fiancé, Juan – after the Peruvian bel canto tenor Juan Diego Flórez.

It was published in AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review in August 2013, though I don’t think it’s back up on their refurbished site yet. I have, on one occasion, read this story to a live audience and actually sung the sung bits. It was fun.

Song Pairing: Given how a variety of songs from The Barber of Seville pop up all over this story, the obvious song choice is “Largo al Factotum” – sung here by Flórez’s castmate at the Met, Peter Mattei.

36. Under the Clear Bright Waters

She dove into this water expecting to die, after all. She never expected  someone was waiting for her underneath.

“Under the Clear Bright Waters” is the only work of outright erotica I’ve ever published. (There’s also “The Giantess’s Dream,” but that’s poetry, and the boundaries with poetry are more fluid.) It’s a lesbian story with a very mild BDSM element, set in ancient Greece, loosely inspired by the myth of Hylas and the water nymphs.

This story was written because of a writing group I used to be part of, along with A. Merc Rustad, Krista D. Ball, and others. Like many close-knit writing groups, we began to fantasize about the idea of publishing our own little anthology. Except that the group contained people who wrote in several very different genres – SFF, romance/erotica, litfic, and other things. We decided that the best compromise between all of these genres was an anthology of fantasy erotic romance, themed around Fae.

Because of struggles in people’s personal lives, disputes within the group, and the other factors that typically hamper such projects, the anthology was never made. But “Under the Clear Bright Waters” was, and now it’s in Monsters In My Mind for your reading pleasure.

Song Pairing: I’m probably just trolling myself at this point, but “Under the Clear Bright Waters” makes reference to an ancient Greek theory in which all bodies of water were connected through a series of underground caverns. So its companion music is now John Williams’ “Passage Through the Planet Core“, from a movie with a very different planet full of underground seas. The soft and mysterious watery atmosphere fits with the story’s tone, I think.

MONSTERS IN MY MIND is available for purchase on Amazon, Kobo, Indigo,  Barnes and Noble, and in Autonomous Press’s Shopify store.

Cool stories I read in January and February

Iona Sharma, “Refugee; or, a nine-item representative inventory of a better world.” (Strange Horizons, January 8.) I don’t think I’ve ever seen a utopia before that so cleverly acknowledged the sacrifices that would be needed to build one – or wove acknowledgement and thanks for those sacrifices right into the characters’ daily lives.

Stephen Graham Jones, “Why I Write.” (Stymie, January 13.) This is not spec fic, but it’s just MFing brilliant. For a while, some of my friends were playing “tag yourself” with this essay. Feel free to tag yourself in comments. I’m 50% “I write because I lost all my action figures long ago” and 50% “I don’t write because I want to live forever. I write because I want to live now.”

Brandon O’Brien, “The Metaphysics of a Wine, In Theory And Practice” (Arsenika, Issue 2, February.) What I love most about this is the juxtaposition of an academic voice (complete with citations!) and the more immediate, urgent, colloquial voice of someone who is actually experiencing the transcendence that the academic tries to describe.

Alex E. Harrow, “A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies.” (Apex, Issue 105, February.) OMG. THIS STORY. MY FEELS. This is delightful and heartbreaking. It may be a somewhat idealized (or overly binary) depiction of librarians, but it’s an amazing depiction of the help and escape that books offer people, especially the most vulnerable people among us.

MONSTERS IN MY MIND: Story notes, part 34 and 35

34. Finding Shadow

Back then we built a smaller dome than sky,

and like shamefaced crayon-smudged children

we colored ’til it shone.

This is one of the first two poems I ever wrote for publication. I wrote them both with Stone Telling’s Queer issue in mind, having very little idea what I was doing but a lot of gumption. I’m still very fond of the sensory descriptions in this one. It’s a poem about two men using some light bondage to help deal with the sensory overload induced by their SFnal setting.

Stone Telling didn’t want it (though they said nice things about both poems), but Eye to the Telescope’s LGBT issue did, so “Finding Shadow” shimmied on over there, and then to Monsters In My Mind.

I just realized that this poem has the same number as Rule 34, which is very funny to me.

48. A Toast to the Hero Upon Her Defeat of the Wyrm of L’Incertain

Hail! Her corded arms, her shining mail,

the panther swiftness of her flashing hand!

“A Toast to the Hero” is “Finding Shadow”‘s companion poem, although they ended up in different places in the collection. Where “Finding Shadow” tells an intimate story of a few moments, “A Toast to the Hero” is an attempt to be as brash and loopy and celebratory and queer-in-several-different-ways-at-once as possible. It’s also the story of a hero who beat a dragon, thanks to some help from her three polyamorous partners of varying genders.

The declamatory, “hail!” structure was in part inspired by Alex Dally MacFarlane’s “Sung Around Alsar-Scented Fires,” which is probably a much better poem than this one.

“A Toast to the Hero” had a winding road to publication, and eventually found a home in Liquid Imagination.

Fun fact: its original working title was even longer.

MONSTERS IN MY MIND is available for purchase on Amazon, Kobo, Indigo,  Barnes and Noble, and in Autonomous Press’s Shopify store.

Speculative Fiction To Read on the Disability Day of Mourning

(TW: This post talks about filicide and about the devaluation of disabled lives.)

Today, March 1, is the Disability Day of Mourning. People will be holding vigils across the US and other countries to remember disabled people who were killed by their families.

I’ve been quiet on previous Days of Mourning. I care, but I don’t always know what to say. My family never tried to kill me, of course – which is not to say that I’m not sensitive about the value of my life.

Cases of filicide sometimes make the news – they seem to especially get news coverage when they involve disabled children and white, American mothers with a martyr complex – but they are more common than you might realize if you only see those highly publicized cases. On the Disability Day of Mourning website you can see that ten disabled people, all adults, died from filicide in the first month and a half of this year alone.

In the US, measures are being taken to dismantle programs like Medicaid and the ADA which have previously protected disabled lives (among others). It seems that valuing our lives is not in vogue among the powerful.

I wasn’t sure what else to say. I’m not good at the kind of essay where I powerfully insists to you that disabled people DO deserve to live. I doubt that anyone who doesn’t already understand that message, on some level, is reading this blog. And in any case, other bloggers will write it better.

I am a fiction reviewer, though, and I suppose I can bring that skill to bear for this purpose.

Media shapes the stories that we tell ourselves about real life – often without us realizing. So media has a role to play in reminding us that disabled lives are worth living. Often the media doesn’t do this job; sometimes it does the reverse. I rarely see media brazen enough to suggest that we should kill disabled people, unless they are terminally ill and asking for death. (I can think of one published SFF short story I read that did kind of do this. I won’t link to it here.) But more often I see media fail by accepting our preventable deaths with a sad shrug. With a sort of, “Well, of course that’s how it is,” and an immediate return to the concerns of our able-bodied heroes who never think about the dead disabled person again. I see this kind of fail far more often, including in popular blockbuster movies, like Rogue One or Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

Here are some stories that do better.

(This is a list focused on autism because autism is… kind of my wheelhouse, but please do post your own recommendations, for any disability, in the comments!)

Corinne Duyvis’s book On the Edge of Gone is about an autistic girl trying to prove that she is worth saving in an apocalypse – and eventually realizing that her whole mindset of having to prove it is wrong.

Rose Lemberg’s novelette “Geometries of Belonging” celebrates an autistic teenager’s ability to defy their violent parents, refuse non-consensual medical treatment, and survive. Tina Gower’s “Twelve Seconds” also centers the autistic protagonist’s ability to choose in this way. Meda Kahn’s short story “Difference of Opinion” is about a non-speaking autistic woman’s struggle to survive in a society that is seriously considering killing her.

Finally, Bogi Takács’s Iwunen Interstellar Investigations, and other stories in the Eren universe, imagine a thriving autistic society far in the future, where nobody’s right to exist as a disabled person is questioned. C.S. Friedman’s This Alien Shore also imagines a powerful and inclusive planet full of non-neurotypical people, generations after the original Earth tried to eradicate them.

If you’d like to support telling stories about disabled lives in ways that value those lives, perhaps consider supporting these authors today – especially Duyvis, Lemberg, Kahn, and Takács, who are autistic themselves.

MONSTERS IN MY MIND: Story notes, part 32 and 33

32. The Pyromancer

But scars grow only

in healing,

and shackles have keys.

I came up with “The Pyromancer” on the same day as “Turning to Stone”; my family was on a day-trip to see the Fourth of July fireworks in Alexandria Bay, New York. They were an auspicious pair, both landing (after revision) in the best possible markets for them: “Turning to Stone” in Stone Telling, and “The Pyromancer” in Goblin Fruit. (You can read it, still in Goblin Fruit, here.)

Yes, the day-trip did involve boats. There is something about groups of small lights in darkness that is immensely meaningful to me – whether they are stars, or city lights, or candles at an Easter vigil, or the bioluminescence of sea creatures, or a scene like this one.

“The Pyromancer” is a much more hopeful, joyful poem than its sibling. (I was also trying to lightly subvert certain tropes in which Magic Always Has to Have a Price.)

33. The Mermaid at Sea World

Children like woodpeckers hammer the glass

and men leer.

This one wasn’t inspired by a real-life event (one hopes). Actually, I don’t remember where it came from, although I know that the lights one sometimes sees in aquariums – refracted through the rippling surface, and then reflected in their odd patterns on the blue-white underwater walls – are another visual that has fascinated me.

“The Mermaid at Sea World” was the cover poem of its issue of Niteblade, and it was reprinted in Imaginarium 4: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing.

MONSTERS IN MY MIND is available for purchase on Amazon, Kobo, Indigo,  Barnes and Noble, and in Autonomous Press’s Shopify store.

Autistic Book Party, Episode 43: Leia: Princess of Alderaan

Note: This review contains minor spoilers for “The Last Jedi,” though I’ve tried to keep all references to the movie’s events vague.

Today’s Book: “Leia: Princess of Alderaan,” a Star Wars tie-in novel by Claudia Gray.

The Plot: A teenage Princess Leia learns that her parents are a part of the Rebel Alliance – and, against their wishes, joins them.

Autistic Character(s): Amilyn Holdo, a girl Leia’s age who joins her on some of her adventures.

Ever since seeing “The Force Awakens,” I have been on a bit of a Star Wars kick. It’s not a thing I’ve mentioned in public much, but it’s been a thing. When I asked for Star Wars books for Christmas, I was expecting them to be escapist fun and to let me spend a little more time in the galaxy far, far away with my favorite characters. I wasn’t expecting to need to make an Autistic Book Party episode about it.

But “Leia: Princess of Alderaan” portrays a younger version of Amilyn Holdo, a sympathetic character from The Last Jedi, as very clearly non-neurotypical.

(Yes, we are talking about Vice-Admiral Amilyn Holdo, played by Laura Dern, although obviously, she doesn’t have that rank in this book. I’ve been told that other viewers noticed something non-neurotypical-looking about her in the film itself, but that went right over my head, so the book was a surprise.)

Amilyn Holdo in “Leia: Princess of Alderaan” has the following characteristics:

Atypical facial expressions, especially a habitually “glazed” look
Dresses and does her hair very eccentrically
Speaks in an “airy monotone”
Stares off into space
Cheerfully goes for the snacks at an important diplomatic function instead of networking or playing politics as the characters are supposed to
Has unusual interests at intense levels: for example, memorizing the astrological systems of various planets, in a universe where most people don’t believe in astrology
Has unusual emotional reactions, including being cheerful and enthusiastic about “mortal peril”
Is quite clever, and often figures things out before the other characters do, but is also too “guileless” to know important unspoken things, like why you shouldn’t say critical things about the Empire in the Empire’s apprentice legislature sessions
Habitually has communication difficulties, sometimes to do with being literal, but more often to do with using some odd metaphor or allusion that she thinks makes her thoughts perfectly clear, while everyone else scratches their head and wonders what she is talking about. This includes times when she is talking about one of the things that she’s figured out before everyone else – but nobody realizes she’s figured it out until later, often after she’s put the plan that she thought she explained into action. Towards the end of the book, Leia reflects that she is learning to “speak Amilyn” and is doing a better job than before of figuring out what Holdo means when she talks.

Holdo is from a planet called Gatalenta which has some strange cultural traditions, including using aerial acrobatics to meditate. While one might initially chalk up some of Holdo’s strangeness to being from Gatalenta, it is eventually revealed that her choice of clothing and other habits are very atypical for that planet, and that she doesn’t fit in there, either.

It’s not one hundred percent clear that Holdo’s neurotype is autistic; sometimes she veers into more generic, Luna Lovegood-esque kookiness. But she is definitely not neurotypical, and when you list her traits like I just did, they resemble autism – particularly the “female”* presentation of autism – more than any other condition I’m aware of.

(*In scare quotes because people with this presentation can have varying genders, but that is largely irrelevant to this post.)

Holdo is a sympathetic character with a lot to offer. Her cleverness, resourcefulness, and enthusiasm come in handy on many occasions. Two instances stand out to me, because they are helpful things of types that I very rarely get to see autistic characters doing. First, Holdo is a source of emotional support for Leia – helping her process her feelings about her family and the Rebellion by teaching her Gatalentan meditation techniques. Second, although Holdo is sometimes guileless about social dangers, she is sometimes able to solve them in her own way. In a wonderful scene toward the end, Leia and Holdo return from a dangerous mission and are intercepted by an Imperial officer who is suspicious about where they came from. Holdo uses her knowledge of astrology to come up with a plausible alibi, but she also socially misdirects the officer in a very striking way – deliberately staring into space, looking even more glazed than usual, and beginning to monologue enthusiastically about the astrological aspects of her travels until the officer gets embarrassed and waves her on through.

Other characters, including Leia, are also able to help Holdo when she needs it – bailing her out when she veers close to saying dangerous things in the apprentice legislature; being patient and learning to figure out her way of speaking, instead of demanding that she change it; giving her a space to talk out her own problems, such as her urge to rebel from Gatalentan culture. Leia and Holdo’s friendship – and, likely, the friendships between Holdo and other characters – is mutual and genuine.

The older Holdo in The Last Jedi is not as visibly weird as the younger one in this novel. In my opinion, this isn’t an inconsistency; it’s a change that could very plausibly have happened as the teenage Holdo got older and learned more skills, including the skills of military command.

Holdo being autistic also casts a very interesting new light on her actions in The Last Jedi. It’s not a light that I’m going to talk about here at any length; to do that, I’d need to re-watch the movie with the book in mind and give it its own, separate review. But it’s worth noting that the older Vice-Admiral Holdo’s conflict with Poe Dameron revolves, in large part, around her ability (or inability, or refusal) to explain her plans for the Resistance in a way that Poe will accept. If she has a pre-existing communication disability – even one that she’s worked on, over the years – then this adds a significant new layer to that conflict.

In short, Amilyn Holdo in “Leia: Princess of Alderaan” is a well-rounded and respectfully portrayed autistic character. Not at all what I expected to find in a Star Wars book – but something I was delighted to discover.

The Verdict: Recommended

Ethics Statement: I have never interacted with Claudia Gray. I read her book because I got a copy for Christmas. All opinions expressed here are my own.

Many of my reviews are chosen by my Patreon backers. This one was not. Reviews chosen by my backers are still in the works. If these reviews are valuable to you, consider becoming a backer; for as little as $1, you can help choose the next autistic book.

For a list of past/future/possible Autistic Book Party books, click here.

Autism and Emotional Labour

This is a thing I’ve been thinking about for a while, and it’s going to be a Very Long Post.

I keep seeing discussions of emotional labour, and I keep seeing them not mention autism.

Sometimes they don’t mention disability at all.
Sometimes they mention disability on a list of marginalizations: “Women are expected to do emotional labour, and so are queer femmes, women of colour, disabled women, etc.” But they don’t really unpack that, except in terms of the amount.
Sometimes they mention disability in terms of spoons – as in, whether or not you have the spoons to do emotional labour today, or whether or not you have the spoons to reciprocate when someone does emotional labour for you.

So I want to talk in a more specific way about the relationship between autism and emotional labour. A lot of this will mean connecting some dots that have been talked about elsewhere, but that I haven’t seen put together in this particular way.

What is emotional labour?

Emotional labour is the mental and emotional work we do to maintain relationships with other people, whether that relationship is an intimate one, or simply coexisting with strangers in a public place.

A lot of people don’t realize that emotional labour is work. It takes time, effort, and spoons from the person doing it. Women and other marginalized groups are often expected to do more emotional labour than others, and that’s not fair.

If you’re nodding impatiently because this is super 101 and you knew it already, you can skip ahead to the next section. Otherwise, you might want to take a break to educate yourself.

This MetaFilter thread is often used as a good introduction to emotional labour. It’s also REALLY LONG, and can be a little overwhelming, so bear that in mind.

I also like this pair of articles, both of which start to describe how I think emotional labour SHOULD work, in a fair society:

“A Modest Proposal for a Fair Trade Emotional Labour Economy”, by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. (This article also starts with a good 101 summing up of what emotional labour is, in case you didn’t want to read the MetaFilter thread.)
“Three Thoughts on Emotional Labour”, by Clementine Morrigan.

A couple of things to remember here

Not everyone, or even every feminist, will agree with these things, but they’re central to how I think about emotional labour right now, and to the attitudes I am bringing into this post.

1: Emotional labour is not bad. We are not trying to eradicate emotional labour from society; it is the glue that holds society together! We are trying to handle it in a more ethical way, which might include things like “make sure it’s consensual” and “make sure everybody does their fair share.”

2: Emotional labour is not capitalist. An ethical attitude towards emotional labour is not capitalist. It’s not “fuck you, pay me” (although there are circumstances where you CAN pay people for it, and that’s okay!) It’s not, “you don’t deserve to be listened to, because you haven’t listened to X number of people today and your balance is overdrawn.” Keeping score too closely harms relationships. Ethical emotional labour practices are more about making sure that everybody is okay with what they’re doing and nobody is exploited. We do want reciprocity, but healthy reciprocity is often long-term and approximate, and sometimes disability or other factors make it difficult to achieve.

3: Emotional labour is a lot of things.

This is the thing that took me the longest to wrap my head around after reading the MetaFilter thread. People would make sweeping statements about what emotional labour was like, but they all seemed to be talking about different things.

For instance, the following things are all forms of emotional labour:

Being friendly to customers while working in customer service, even if you don’t feel like it.
Lending a listening ear to a friend.
Mentally keeping track of what needs to be done around the house and paying attention to the house’s current state, so that you can notice chores that need to be done without needing to be reminded.
Educating people about a topic (I am doing emotional labour by writing this post right now!

MONSTERS IN MY MIND: Story notes, parts 29 and 31

29. Nightmare I

the night becomes a game of not looking

This is what it says on the can – a poem about a nightmare. It’s meant to be the first in a series. Fortunately, the occasions on which I have a nightmare so weird and surreal that I need to write it down upon waking are quite rare, so I don’t know that the series will ever be finished.

Autism News, 2018/01/27

More from Rose Lemberg’s “Writing While Autistic” series:

On autistic inertia
On giving oneself permission to write – and permission not to write  (This one hit me especially hard; in fact, I have been changing aspects of how I schedule my time because of it and the conversations that came out of it.)
On identity

Media and Reviews:

Lydia Brown calls for a boycott of “To Siri, With Love”  (The article also ends with a great list of intersectional disability organizations that are taking donations.)
Derek Budryk reviews “Roman J. Israel, Esq.”
Elizabeth Bartmess on autistic-compatible plots (This was inspired by my “Mouse” review.

MONSTERS IN MY MIND: Story notes, part 26 and 27

26. The Parable of the Supervillain

At four in the morning with the baby biting me,

I watched you call the President of Australia

from his velvet bed

and feed him to the army ants.

This poem appeared in Apex Magazine, in March 2014. Its inspiration was a moment I had with a then-close friend who was visiting me. I had a meltdown triggered by something, and yelled in awful ways – I very rarely yell during meltdowns, I’m usually more inclined to just freeze up and cry, but this one was really bad. Afterwards I was full of shame. I’ve had people who always yelled that way when I was growing up, I know how damaging it is, and I felt like a monster because I couldn’t stop myself. And my friend just came to me where I was sitting there crying and wordlessly put her arms around me.

I don’t want this post to turn into some kind of weird, “and therefore it’s okay to yell at people” apologia. Obviously, it’s not okay to yell, and it is damaging, and I’ve been actively working on training myself into alternate strategies so that I don’t damage the people on whom I rely for support. But in the moment, I was overwhelmed with gratitude for my friend’s forgiveness, and I decided to write about that feeling.

Back when I was more conventionally religious, the Parable of the Prodigal Son was a story that had immense meaning for me. It still kind of does. And you don’t have to know me all that well to know that I appreciate fabulous villains. Once those two elements were in place, with the emotional core to back them up, the rest of it was easy.

27. The Company of Heaven

She couldn’t say why the angels frightened her. They swelled with too much light, but so did the sun, and she didn’t cower away from that. Maybe it was the way they said her name. Like another thing that knew her. Another that wouldn’t leave her alone.

“The Company of Heaven” is an older piece that never quite found a home before MONSTERS IN MY MIND. It’s named after a little-known work by Benjamin Britten, which I chanced to see performed live back in, oh, it must have been 2010 or even earlier. I was struck by this particular part of the text, a quote from John Ruskin, which is spoken aloud during the sixth movement:

…suppose that over Ludgate Hill the sky had indeed suddenly become blue instead of black; and that a flight of twelve angels, ‘covered with silver wings, and their feathers with gold,’ had alighted on the cornice of the railroad bridge, as the doves alight on the cornices of St. Mark’s at Venice; and had invited the eager men of business below, in the centre of a city confessedly the most prosperous in the world, to join them for five minutes in singing the first five verses of such a psalm as the 103rd – ‘Bless the Lord, oh my soul, and all that is with me,’ (the opportunity now being given for the expression of their most hidden feelings) ‘all that is within me, bless his holy name, and forget not all His benefits.’ Do you not even thus, in mere suggestion, feel shocked at the thought, and as if my now reading the words were profane? And cannot you fancy that the sensation of the crowd at so violent and strange an interruption of traffic, might be somewhat akin to… the feeling attributed by Goethe to Mephistopheles at the song of the angels: ‘Discord I hear, and intolerable jingling?’

I knew immediately that I wanted to write about this scenario, about someone being directly confronted by Actual Angels – angels who didn’t appear to want anything of them, except that they consider joining in a song – and being completely unable to appreciate or accept the experience.

At first – being much more conventionally religious, back in 2010, than I am now – my view of what such a person would be like was very negative, and the story was going to be one of these unpleasant, self-critical, character study kinds of stories. But that version of the story never quite gelled, and I could never quite bring myself to write it down. Eventually I realized that Cassie, the story’s protagonist, needed to be much more sympathetic. She needed to have reasons for being uneasy around angels that parallelled my own – she is busy, yes, but she’s also queer and traumatized, acutely afraid of being called crazy, and suspicious that the social value systems that go along with believing in angels will also harm her in multiple ways. I needed to own those things as valid and relatable feelings, and write them accordingly. And I needed to give her, not a judgmental, downer ending, but a hopeful one.

So the story eventually happened that way, and was finished in 2012. It never sold, and I wonder if that’s due to the weird combination of both being queer and having heavy Christian overtones – who would buy that? I don’t know. I probably wouldn’t even buy that. It could also be that this is an earlier work, and maybe my craft just wasn’t quite there. But it’s a story I love, so I put it into MONSTERS IN MY MIND, and now you can read it, too.

By the way, all the words sung by the angels in this story are actual hymns, except for “Heaven is here, and the angels of heav’n,” which is from the Britten piece.

Song Pairing: Britten’s “The Company of Heaven” is difficult to track down in recorded form, but if you’d like to hear it for yourself, there appear to be several versions on YouTube.

MONSTERS IN MY MIND is available for purchase on Amazon, Kobo, Indigo,  Barnes and Noble, and in Autonomous Press’s Shopify store.