Archive | October 2020

New Story: A Burden of Transmuting Metal

Oct28

Most of my blog posts lately have been about new publications! It’s true I’ve had a bumper crop this fall, but after this one you can expect a lull. I’m pleased to announce that my short story “A Burden of Transmuting Metal” came out on Sunday in Silver Blade. You can read it here. You will notice an accompanying graphic depicting a dramatic tornado; this has nearly nothing to do with the story.

Some of my stories are very much inspired by real places (“Lómr” is a clear example of this). Last fall, when I had just arrived in Grinnell, I somehow got the idea to write a story set at a fictionalized version of Grinnell College, my new place of employment. So this is a story of academia, and grad school. (It’s a pretty happy grad school story! I have another less happy grad school story that I’m still shopping.) I also wove in the Manchu class I took as a Ph.D. student. But most importantly, “A Burden of Transmuting Metal” is a portal fantasy that pays homage most explicitly to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.

So last November I’m drafting this story about portals in college towns in rural Iowa, and one day I walk onto campus and see this:

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It was uncanny.

Almost one year later, the story is published, and the empty doorway is still on campus.

New Story: Mijara’s Freedom

Oct14

My short story “Mijara’s Freedom” came out last Friday in The Future Fire, an online magazine of social-political and progressive speculative fiction. You can read my story here. Like “Yet A Youth,” “Mijara’s Freedom” actually originally appeared in print in slightly different form in a school literary magazine. In this case, it was the 2008 issue of Images, the literary and art magazine of Edina High School. So this story is pretty old! Also, it was titled “Parvana’s Freedom” then.

Pieces in The Future Fire are illustrated, and I feel so lucky to have beautiful artwork by Cécile Matthey accompanying my story. I haven’t seen my characters brought visually to life since the cover reveals for Sparkers and Wildings, so it was pretty magical. In fact, the way the artist imagined the protagonists was quite different from how I pictured them, but I love her rendering.

I wrote this story more than twelve years ago, so its origins are rather hazy now. But the action takes place against a backdrop of wildfires, and I seem to recall taking visual inspiration from a photo I saw in the newspaper. This fall, of course, devastating wildfires in the West are in the news again, and so “Mijara’s Freedom” might hit a certain way, although it is not a story about climate change.