We shared the experience of being alive and then we took some tea

[sovay]

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 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.

Comments

[yhlee]

Congratulations! :D

[lilysea]

We shared the experience of being alive and then we took some tea

I love your headline! ^_^

[gwynnega]

Congratulations!

[selenak]

Congratulations! I must place orders for this book. Last year I had occasion to do a rereading of some Hoffmann canon. He's a big deal in my hometown of Bamberg, where he spent some key years of his life (not very happy but crucial ones), with the result of having the local theatre, schools, streets etc. being named after him and his works in some form always present in book stores and the occasional stage. I think my own favourite of his stories are the Lebensansichten des Katers Murr. The "suppressed prologue by the author" certainly speaks not just to the soul of cats: :)

Mit der Sicherheit und Ruhe, die dem wahren Genie angeboren, übergebe ich der Welt meine Biographie, damit sie lerne, wie man sich zum großen Kater bildet, meine Vortrefflichkeit im ganzen Umfange erkenne, mich liebe, schätze, ehre, bewundere und ein wenig anbete.
Sollte jemand verwegen genug sein, gegen den gediegenen Wert des außerordentlichen Buchs einige Zweifel erheben zu wollen, so mag er bedenken, daß er es mit einem Kater zu tun hat, der Geist, Verstand besitzt und scharfe Krallen.

[thisbluespirit]

Oh, congratulations!!

[cyphomandra]

Congratulations!! (and happy 2019!)

[strange_complex]

Congratulations! That does indeed seem like a good way to start the year.

[alatefeline]

Hurrah!

[selkie]

SLURP THE METAPHORICAL ROCK CRAB OF VICTORY!

*smashes a few more open for you*

JUST PICK THE CRUNCHLY BITS OUT OF THE OYSTERS. SPIT THEM AT SKEPTICS. VERY FRESH.

Seriously, you are to be commended not only for completing a thing -- a very good, slight-departure of a thing -- but for taking a chance on the market in spite of miniature philosophers.

[drwex]

Mazal tov!

[sporky_rat]

Hurrah hurrah! Congratulations.

Here's to this signifying a good 2019.

[isis]

Hey, congratulations on the sale!

Also in my slow read of your collection, I recently read "The Salt House" and I think that is my favorite so far.

[asakiyume]

I am so happy that that excellent story has found a home so soon. Three cheers!

And three cheers for Hoffmann influences, too!

[moon_custafer]

Huzzah!

For what it’s worth, while I can see the Hoffman influence now that you mention it, I don’t think it was glaringly obvious before.

[pameladean]

What lovely news! Congratulations! And it certainly makes me look more kindly upon this nascent year.

P.

[umadoshi]

Ahhhh, so much yay! Congrats!

[rheasilvia]

Congratulations!!! Well done - that's wonderful. And I love ETA Hoffmann, too - he is amazing at a certain kind of fantasy literature, and pretty much invented many of the tropes that appear as commonplaces today.