Seeds and Other Stories

by Ursula Pflug

In these stories seers and vagabonds, addicts and gardeners succeed and sometimes fail at creating new kinds of community against apocalyptic backdrops. They build gardens in the ruins, transport seeds and songs from one world to another and from dreams to waking life. Where do you plant a seed someone gave you in a dream? How do you build a world more free of trauma when it’s all you’ve ever known? Sometimes the seed you wake up holding in your hand is the seed of a new world.

“Ursula Pflug’s stories are the kind you want to carry around with you for those days when it feels like you’re living in a strange and incomprehensible world; her stories will make you feel less alone. They are wondrous and unique little creatures that desire nothing more than to play fetch with your weirdest dreams. They are wild inventions built of words and sentences that dig into your psyche and send back reports about all you never knew of the world. They are sly and joyous, scary and entrancing, profound, unsettling, amusing, and utterly—perfectly!—unique.”
—Matthew Cheney, Hudson Prize winning author of Blood: Stories

“Ursula Pflug has to be one of the best short story writers I’ve ever read. There is no place to enter or leave an Ursula Pflug story that is not a portal to dark wonder. First you go in and find transformed worlds; then, when you come out with new vision, your own world changes as you observe it. Enter, and I promise you will be changed.”
—Candas Jane Dorsey, author of Black Wine and The Adventures of Isabel

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

312 pages, Paperback

Published April 30, 2020

About the author

Born in Tunis to German parents, Ursula Pflug grew up in Toronto and attended the University of Toronto and The Ontario College of Art and Design. She travelled widely, living on her own in Hawai'i and in New York City as a teen in the late seventies. Formerly a graphic artist, Pflug began concentrating on her writing after moving to the rural Kawarthas to raise a family with the internationally known new media sculptor Doug Back.

Her first novel, the critically acclaimed magic realist/fantasy Green Music was published by Tesseract Books in 2002.

Her long awaited story collection After the Fires was published by Tightrope Books in 2008. ATF received advance praise from Matthew Cheney and Jeff VanderMeer and an Honourable Mention from the Sunburst Award jury. It was short-listed for the Aurora Award.

Her second novel, the YA/Adult crossover The Alphabet Stones (Blue Denim, 2013) received advance praise from Charles DeLint, Tim Wynne-Jones, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Candas Jane Dorsey, Jan Thornill and more. The Alphabet Stones was a finalist for the ReLit.

In 2014 a YA/Adult flash novel, Motion Sickness (illustrated by SK Dyment) appeared from Inanna, and was also a finalist for the ReLit Award. Motion Sickness received advance praise from Heather Spears.

In addition, a new story collection, Harvesting The Moon, was published by PS in Great Britain, with advance praise from Jeff VanderMeer and an introduction by Candas Jane Dorsey.

Also in 2014, Pflug`s first edited book, the fundraiser anthology They Have To Take You In, appeared from Hidden Brook Press. The beneficiary was The Dana Fund, administered by the CMHA, a no-overhead fund to benefit women and families in transition. THTTYI includes stories from Michelle Berry, Jan Thornhill, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Silvia Moreno-Garcia and more.

2015 saw the publication of Playground of Lost Toys (Exile) co-edited with Colleen Anderson. Playground was shortlisted for the Aurora Award.

2017 and 2018 saw the publication of two novellas, Mountain and Down From (Snuggly). Mountain (Inanna) was a finalist for The Sunburst Award, and received advance praise from Heather Spears and Candas Jane Dorsey.

In 2020 her third story collection, Seeds, appeared from Inanna and received a starred PW review, as well as accolades at Black Gate and Strange Horizons.. 2021 saw the release of a new anthology, Food of My people, co-edited with Candas Jane Dorsey.

A writer of both genre and literary short fiction, Pflug has published over ninety stories in award winning publications in Canada, the United States and the UK, including Strange Horizons, Fantasy, Lightspeed, Now Magazine, The Nine Muses, Quarry, Tesseracts, Leviathan, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Nemonymous, Back Brain Recluse, Transversions, Bamboo Ridge, Bandersnatch, Postscripts, Herizons, Chizine and many others.

She has had several solo or co-authored plays produced by professional companies, and was a contributing editor at The Peterborough Review for three years. Pflug’s first published short story, “Memory Lapse at The Waterfront” has been reprinted in After The Fires. Pflug wrote the script and storyboard for the short film version, directed by Carol McBride. “Waterfont” toured festivals and was purchased by WTN.

Pflug has received numerous Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council and Laidlaw Foundation grants in support of her novels, short fiction, criticism and plays. She has previously been a finalist for the KM Hunter Award, the Descant Novella Contest, the Three Day Novel Contest, the Aurora Award and others. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee.

Pflug mentors private clients in creative writing and has taught short fiction writing at Loyalist College, The Campbellford Resource Centre, and Trent University (with Derek Newman-Stille.)

For several years she was artistic director at Cat Sass Reading Series, in Norwood, Ontario, showcasing local, national, and international

Reviews

[Zach · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lots of thoughts up on Strange Horizons now.

[Ursula Pflug · Rating 5 out of 5]

There have been some lovely reviews of Seeds, my third story collection, including a starred review at Publisher's Weekly. When I get a moment I'll post links to some of them. Enjoy spring! Get outside safely.

[L.A. Carreiro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ursula Pflug's Seeds and Other Stories is a delicious collection of short stories filled with the fantastical and magical stuff I love, like portals to other dimensions and the extraordinary as part of everyday life. Pflug's characters are crafted with care and inhabit their worlds accepting, and often understanding, the fantastic events that go on around them. Imagine where you'll be taken in a story called "The Lonely Planet Guide to Other Dimensions". This book is a wonderful escape!

[Lynn Hutchinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ursula Pflug’s stories slide you seductively into places that you may, as a child, have thought or known to be real. As a child of six, I travelled before sleep to a forest that was the same forest I’d visit on mornings or afternoons – a forest that lived beside – or beyond – the forest of my daytime life; and in the night forest I encountered small benevolent beings who lulled me to sleep. Reading Ursula Pflug’s Seeds and Other Stories takes me back to that world. I’m transported through portals and slight but charged shifts in time and space into realities that shimmer and hum beside what we normally perceive as the everyday reality of kitchens, bars, houses, gardens, buildings.

In these places, nothing is still, nothing permanent or fixed. The Red Arcade Hotel in “Lonely Planet Guide to Other Dimensions” moves of its own accord across the unstable sands and dunes. Rachel is transported from Red Arcade to a sister hotel, where she and Esmé pass each other on the stairs; where she writes Esme into her story, and we’re led to wonder which of the two women is real. Esme asks: “Do I only exist because she is writing me?” It’s as if their molecules and imaginations have dissolved into and through each other’s bodies and meanings.

For me, Pflug’s storytelling is deceptively understated. The quiet shift is glimpsed out of the corner of the reader’s eye before the brief illumination of the final moment, as in “Castorides,” in which the identity of the friend is not considered until the end – a delicious delight.

She shows us that the sands or rivers, the buildings or gardens that we move through are not the same sands, rivers, gardens, buildings that they were only five minutes before. Even the stars transport themselves, falling from a lover’s body in “Myrtle’s Marina;” in “Seeds,” they descend to a rooftop before claiming a gardener who was once flesh and blood, who once nurtured her vegetables and flowers in the courtyard of a building gutted by fire. In “The Dark Lake,” a lover’s flesh can dissolve as “the flood of orgasm or the pull of a dream softens the edges of her skin so that the secrets slide out like puddles.”

The collection opens and closes with mother stories. In “Mother Down the Well,” the mother explores a portal in a well where, before being raised and taken to dry in the barn, she lives for decades, attesting that “magic is a form of thought.” For me, her statement is auspicious: it’s an underpinning of this collection. In the heartbreakingly beautiful “My Mother’s Skeleton,” grief, loss and delicate hope braid themselves together for the protagonist living inside her mother’s ribcage, and through which she can see shooting stars while the smell of woodsmoke from cooking fires “wafts through the slatted bones.”

The beings – human, supernatural, plant, animal – in Seeds are strangely familiar, and it’s only when you stop reading that you look up and around you and see that your surroundings, the room you’re in, the trees, the sky have been altered; their textures, colours, ways of being appear new and strange, and you need to get back inside the stories again in order to revisit your sense of wonder.

[Des Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

So if these stories were published separately before, how did they mend together here into this rich and rare book that I have found it to be? Almost as if there was originally no intent for such happenstance but now, in spite of my wayward path through it, any autonomous intentional doubt somehow creates both an emotional equivalent to oxymorons and the bolstering of pure certainty. In the previous story a happy rhododendron bush. Now “a cacophony of rhubarb”. And an endless euphony of you.
“; premonition soaking through me like darkening twilight.”

The above is quoted from a review that is either too long or too impractical to post here.
It is from my latest review of the fiction of URSULA PFLUG and there are many other such detailed and itemised reviews available of her previous works as posted on-line under my name.

[Heather Babcock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magical and memorable, Pflug's prose is at once both poetic and breathtaking. The stories in this collection have fantastical elements and yet all feel grounded in reality. My favorite is "A Shower of Fireflies":

"She wrote in the margins of the passing years, trimmed the wicks of the kerosene lamps." (p.264)

These stories will rattle your windows *and* tuck you in at night.

Highly recommended.

[Jim Fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ursula Pflug is one of my favourite writers. Her matter-of-fact manner of writing about such things as portals, witches and a woman who lives in a well. A fine collection.

[M.G. Field · Rating 5 out of 5]

These stories are provocative, challenging, and ultimately rewarding. The fantastic and surreal elements are often entwined in a gritty realism in both story and setting.

In "Big Ears," Joey is a sax player whose talent and romantic joy have been harmed by heroin addiction. He is accompanied by a grouchy, drooling animal which we discover was once a proud gryphon. The animal is a totemic manifestation of his demons: self-loathing, loneliness and a declining muse. He is rescued by Rickie, an aspiring singer who hopes to grow a majestic bird. She offers him money to get his sax out of hock, and a gig to rediscover his talent. Saving a life, she tells him, is the entry fee to heaven.

Joey takes this notion to heart when Phoebe moves into Rickie's Manhattan apartment. Although Joey sees her as an unwelcome interloper, he bonds with her at the racetrack, and gently guides her away from her secret heroin addiction. The interplay among the characters is compelling, and only enhanced by the surreal symbolism. Like the characters in many of the other stories, they are at a "crossroads, choosing...whether to desecrate one's light or shine it."

[Scott Neigh]

Speculative short stories, mostly set in worlds close to but distinct from our own. Quietly weird, often unsettling or vaguely sad. The writing wraps around and immerses you, doesn't spoonfeed, so there were some I didn't understand, but the collection as a whole was definitely to my taste and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

[Chris Kuriata · Rating 4 out of 5]

I find it interesting that the oldest story in this collection was originally published in 1983, and still all of the stories work together to create a unified mood instead of being a disjointed collection of odds and ends.

"That was the summer the non-smokers died" is one of my favorite beginnings to a story, and Plug's writing creates all sensations of that particular summer.