We shared the experience of being alive and then we took some tea
My short story "Where the Sky Is Silver and the Earth Is Brass" has been accepted by Machinations and Mesmerism: Tales Inspired by E.T.A. Hoffmann, edited by Farah Rose Smith (Ulthar Press, June 2019).
I am extraordinarily pleased by this development and not just because it continues to start the year off right. It is the one piece of original fiction I finished in 2018. I wrote it at the beginning of December; it was supposed to be seasonal crack for![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
selkie, but then history got in the way. It features Jewish queerness and demons. Its protagonist is a partisan after the war. In order not to disappear down my usual rabbit hole, I researched the dates of Hanukkah in 1948—which thanks to the interaction of calendars turned out to be partly the dates of Hanukkah in 1949—and then resolutely stayed away from the internet/books. One name is taken from my family history and everything else is invented, so far as I know. The title comes from misremembering a line in Isaac Bashevis Singer's "The Devil's Trick," translated and collected in Zlateh the Goat (1966): "The devil licked his singed tail and ran off with his wife to the land where no people walk, no cattle tread, where the sky is copper and the earth is iron." Once I'd gotten it wrong, I kept it. I like my version better for its context anyway.
I am also pleased because while I don't talk about him as much as some other authors, Hoffmann is one of my literary influences who is embarrassingly obvious to me. When my first collection Singing Innocence and Experience (2005) was reviewed by Publishers Weekly, it was gently faulted for "the presence of a few too many earnest young student-artists and musicians obsessed with love or knowledge" and it's true that I wrote all of the stories in college or grad school, but it's also true that Romantic literature. Technically I was first exposed at the age of six when my god-aunt took me to the New York City Ballet's The Nutcracker and I imprinted on Drosselmeyer, but I really fell into Hoffmann as a sophomore at Brandeis when the syllabus for Andrew Swensen's "Night, Death, and the Devil" (COML 127a) included, among other forays into the fantastic and the grotesque, "The Golden Pot," and it's not even my favorite of his stories, but it sent me looking for the rest on the spot. I can recognize it now as a commonplace of weird fiction and even of other authors I was reading that semester, but I noticed first with him the idea that sitting down under a tree, glancing up at a window, walking into a bar might take you from the ordinary world into the one where you come out dead or mad or shadowless or married to a beautiful blue-eyed snake and living in the bliss of Atlantis, writing poetry. In the case of the story I placed with this anthology, it's mostly a matter of being around mirrors.
Altogether my reaction to receiving the acceptance was an enthusiastic yell. I'm sure 2019 will contain its share of burning garbage, but I'm really enjoying it so far.
I am extraordinarily pleased by this development and not just because it continues to start the year off right. It is the one piece of original fiction I finished in 2018. I wrote it at the beginning of December; it was supposed to be seasonal crack for
selkie, but then history got in the way. It features Jewish queerness and demons. Its protagonist is a partisan after the war. In order not to disappear down my usual rabbit hole, I researched the dates of Hanukkah in 1948—which thanks to the interaction of calendars turned out to be partly the dates of Hanukkah in 1949—and then resolutely stayed away from the internet/books. One name is taken from my family history and everything else is invented, so far as I know. The title comes from misremembering a line in Isaac Bashevis Singer's "The Devil's Trick," translated and collected in Zlateh the Goat (1966): "The devil licked his singed tail and ran off with his wife to the land where no people walk, no cattle tread, where the sky is copper and the earth is iron." Once I'd gotten it wrong, I kept it. I like my version better for its context anyway.I am also pleased because while I don't talk about him as much as some other authors, Hoffmann is one of my literary influences who is embarrassingly obvious to me. When my first collection Singing Innocence and Experience (2005) was reviewed by Publishers Weekly, it was gently faulted for "the presence of a few too many earnest young student-artists and musicians obsessed with love or knowledge" and it's true that I wrote all of the stories in college or grad school, but it's also true that Romantic literature. Technically I was first exposed at the age of six when my god-aunt took me to the New York City Ballet's The Nutcracker and I imprinted on Drosselmeyer, but I really fell into Hoffmann as a sophomore at Brandeis when the syllabus for Andrew Swensen's "Night, Death, and the Devil" (COML 127a) included, among other forays into the fantastic and the grotesque, "The Golden Pot," and it's not even my favorite of his stories, but it sent me looking for the rest on the spot. I can recognize it now as a commonplace of weird fiction and even of other authors I was reading that semester, but I noticed first with him the idea that sitting down under a tree, glancing up at a window, walking into a bar might take you from the ordinary world into the one where you come out dead or mad or shadowless or married to a beautiful blue-eyed snake and living in the bliss of Atlantis, writing poetry. In the case of the story I placed with this anthology, it's mostly a matter of being around mirrors.
Altogether my reaction to receiving the acceptance was an enthusiastic yell. I'm sure 2019 will contain its share of burning garbage, but I'm really enjoying it so far.
no subject
Thank you! It was a definite demarcation.