How your heart is, how is it deep

[sovay]

Rabbit, rabbit! The Deadlands has reopened to poetry submissions. Send us your spectral, your chthonic, your grave-goods, your grief-gifts. We look forward to following you down.

My persistent typo for the name of this magazine is The Deadlads, which feels inevitably as though it will have to generate a ghost poem for A.E. Housman, even though Tom Stoppard sort of sewed that one up years ago. Have some links.

1. In memory of Norma Waterson, her music for a blessing.

2. On double standards of representation: "I also do think that placing the entire onus of trying to anticipate every single bad angle someone somewhere might take when reading the text upon the shoulders of the writer – instead of giving in that there should be also a level of responsibility on the part of the audience not to project whatever biases they might carry onto the text – is the kind of thing that will only end up reducing the range of stories that can be told about marginalized people." I hope she writes her heist story with a cool Latino car thief. On the subject of Jewish vampires, Leigh Ann Hussey's "Blood Libel" (1991) is an oldie but a goodie.

3. I like this music video. It reminds me of the films of Peter Strickland: Qlowski, "Folk Song."

Comments

[oracne]

I'm listening to "Frost and Fire."

[sovay]

I'm listening to "Frost and Fire."

It's so strange to think of all of them singing from the other side of the dark river now. And the music still there, the river itself.

(I have been listening to her, too: it's the best way to remember.)

[teenybuffalo]

Thank you for reminding me of "Blood Libel." I read that story early in my childhood (in that anthology of stories about child and teenage vampires) and I've loved it ever since. Now you mention it, I must have first checked out that anthology not long after the story was first published.

[sovay]

Thank you for reminding me of "Blood Libel." I read that story early in my childhood (in that anthology of stories about child and teenage vampires) and I've loved it ever since.

You're welcome! I read it in the same anthology, around the same time—I found it in my elementary school library. Jane Yolen's "Mama Gone" is the only other story I remember by name. I wonder if I could re-find it now.

[teenybuffalo]

I've got a copy if you ever want to reread it on paper! It's a cheap paperback, not the beautiful hardcover from my childhood library with cover art of a child with fangs wiping his little chin with a napkin, but the contents are still great.

Off-topic, my other favorites in that book were Esther Friesner's "The Blood-Ghoul of Scarsdale," which aged poorly in terms of cool kid slang lingo but is still funny to me, and the supremely bonkers "A Cold Stake" by Phyllis Ann Karr, where the hero's problem isn't even that he's a vampire, it's that he's imaginative in a world where people with active imaginations are disadvantaged and the targets of bigotry.

Anyhow, that Tumblr post. Dude. I printed it out so I can reread it at my leisure; haven't done that for a while.

[sara]

I used to dance to Leigh Ann's band in college. Damn but that was a loss for everyone when she died.

[sovay]

I used to dance to Leigh Ann's band in college. Damn but that was a loss for everyone when she died.

I found out about her death through LJ. I didn't know until then that she'd been a musician; other commenters hadn't known about her fiction writing. Did you know her in college, or just her music?

[sara]

Oh, yeah, she was a hell of a fiddler. There was a mostly-SCA pickup Celtic band that used to play for Irish dancing at a nationalist bar on the west side of town when I was an undergrad. I got served at the bar there when I was ridiculously underage, on the principle that I knew everyone in the band and was obviously there to dance, not start shit.

So, yes: definitely knew her in real life, but she was older and (then, at least) much cooler than me.

[nineweaving]

And the music still there, the river itself.

This.

Nine