With gray and with white and with blue fruit

1. My short story "Skerry-Bride" has been accepted by Devilfish Review. It was written while listening to Moss of Moonlight's Winterwheel in November 2013, right before I saw Thor: The Dark World; it's about jötnar. The magazine is a new one for me and it should be obvious why they got my attention. They give out the Kraken Awards.

(Moss of Moonlight are now Felled and have a new side project. I recommend.)

2. The fuzzy nautilus is not extinct! I do not think I had known that Allonautilus scrobiculatus existed prior to this article, but I'm very glad it does. I hope it continues to. Those are beautiful animals.

3. I realize that these archaeological windfalls have caused the city of Istanbul so much construction tsuris that The New Yorker cannot resist invoking Boston's Big Dig, but who says history doesn't have a sense of humor?

In fact, a tiny Byzantine church did turn up in Yenikapı, under the foundations of some razed apartment buildings. But the real problem was the large number of Byzantine shipwrecks that began to surface soon after the excavation began, in 2004. Dating from the fifth to the eleventh century, the shipwrecks illustrated a previously murky chapter in the history of shipbuilding and were exceptionally well preserved, having apparently been buried in sand during a series of natural disasters.

In accordance with Turkish law, control of the site shifted to the museum, and use of mechanical tools was suspended. From 2005 to 2013, workers with shovels and wheelbarrows extracted a total of thirty-seven shipwrecks. When the excavation reached what had been the bottom of the sea, the archeologists announced that they could finally cede part of the site to the engineers, after one last survey of the seabed—just a formality, really, to make sure they hadn't missed anything. That's when they found the remains of a Neolithic dwelling, dating from around 6000 B.C.

The shipwrecks are wondrous to me. The article asks some worthwhile questions.

4. I like George Mackay Brown's poetry wherever I find it and "The Horse Fair" is no exception. I still need to track down a recording of Peter Maxwell Davies' The Kestrel Road (2003); it sets two of my favorite poems that are not "John Barleycorn."

5. This gemstone looks like the start of a story: the god Pan studying a dramatic mask. I keep forgetting that he has anything to do with Greek theater. I imagine him the kind of critic who throws things and heckles. God of fields and wild spaces, also the peanut gallery.

Autolycus has draped himself over the arm of my office chair and is patting at the screen with one paw. I am not sure if he's reacting to the movement of the cursor or the world's cutest sea slug. derspatchel calls it the Shaun the Sheep Slug. My favorite may remain either Nembrotha cristata or Stiliger ornatus. Yes, I'm still missing the sea.

Are your symptoms more at ease or is it hell?

My poem "Firebrands" is now online at Through the Gate. The title comes from a line attributed to Nicholas Noyes, an ancestral relation of my husband's and the officiating minister at the Salem witch trials: "What a sad thing it is to see eight firebrands of hell hanging there." He was speaking of Martha Corey, Mary Eastey, Mary Parker, Alice Parker, Ann Pudeator, Wilmot Redd, Margaret Scott, and Samuel Wardell, Sr., all executed in September 1692. At the hanging of Sarah Good earlier that summer, he had famously urged her to confess and received the reply, "I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink." He died of a throat hemorrhage, choking on his own blood. Nathaniel Hawthorne was so struck by the story, he put it into The House of Seven Gables (1851). When derspatchel and I were in Salem last spring, we talked about looking for Nicholas' grave, but we looked at the sea instead. It is pretty much the fault of Warlock (1989) that this poem exists at all.

The rest of the issue is small, but very sound. Go read all of them!