#both of those books are indie published and relatively short

[criminal-activityinthefrogswamp]

Aww it makes me really happy too, from the reader's side of things, to know my support has been so meaningful to you 🥺 (and to even be complimented on my interpretations by the writer herself). Best of luck to you and pulling through the week <3

I totally forgot original works barely get attention on ao3 (I don't even use the site often) and I literally filtered by original works to find Rust lol.

So in response to "how are you people finding it??": a road to nowhere was the second work to appear when I searched for original work, robot/human relationships, and F/F (I've been scrounging to find any piece of fiction, officially published or not, that fits this niche) and thought "oh, the first in this series is a nice little 7k word short story to read before I go to sleep at a normal and functional time :)" and then was awake at 4am not able to shut my brain up about Rexzee and sleep. I had class the next morning and could barely focus due to sleep deprivation and thinking about robot wife hand motifs.

Really exposing which ao3 account I am rn by my style of long-winded rambling. Anyways, life changing pieces of fiction <3

This is actually extremely interesting-- this means I've done a pretty good job of making sure the target audiences can find it (also I know exactly what you mean and it is a crying shame there is so little original robot/human femslash stuff out there it KILLS me). I'm really glad you were able to find it and that also you like it so much!!!!! I'm having an incredibly awful week for multiple reasons and I've gone back and reread your tags/asks/comments multiple times and it makes me smile and do a little happy-flap every single time. You engage with it in a really genuine and meaningful way and I really love how you've picked up everything I put down plus some stuff I didn't even intend, which as an author is the BEST thing about other people reading your works. Thank you so much for reading Rust, genuinely-- it really makes me so so happy.

[literaticat]

Hi Jenn,

Do people in the industry still use the term “traditional publishing”? I was told that was an incorrect term and that it should be referred to as “trade publishing.”

Do you know why some people consider the term offensive?

Thanks!

OK so here's the thing:

Publishing is a vast industry and within it there are several different "markets" - that is, places that a given book might be created for and sold.

The actual correct term for the branch of the publishing industry I work in, and most authors and illustrators I know work in, and most publishers we work with, is Trade Publishing.

Trade Publishers -- like most imprints of Penguin Random House and Macmillan and Chronicle Books and Candlewick, etc, basically all the publishers you normally hear about -- mostly publish "into the Trade Market." The "Trade Market" is regular bookstores. Pretty much 99% of the books you see on the shelves in B&N or whatever are Trade Books.

There are other markets! For example(s), Educational Publishing is its own market, with its own publishers and its own norms. Religious Publishing is its own market, with its own publishers and its own norms. There are obviously Trade Publishers who also publish "religious" or "educational" type books -- but they are still TRADE BOOKS, they are the religious and educational books you'd see at the regular bookstore. Truly Religious Publishers or Educational Publishers are peddling their books primarily through their own separate distribution channels, and they don't normally work with agents in the same way as Trade Publishers do. If you only shop in a regular bricks-and-mortar bookstore, you may never even see actual Religious Market specific or Ed Market specific books, they would be more likely found in a Religious Bookstore or through a Library or some such. (Though of course, all of them are available online!)

(There are other Markets, too -- like "Mass Market" refers to both a kind of book -- those short chunky paperbacks like they sell in the supermarket or drug store -- and also a Market, specifically, "places like the supermarket or drugstore". Some/most of these books originate in the Trade Market - some are made specifically for the Mass Market).

"Traditional" publishing is a term that sprung up in relatively recent years (like, the past 20 years or so???) -- to differentiate it from Self-Publishing/"Indie Publishing" -- so often on websites where, for example, people are advocating for self-publishing options, they will say "We are breaking the mold of Traditional Publishing!" or whatever. It basically became shorthand for "the opposite of indie publishing"***.

Now, I understand that the vast majority of people saying "Traditional Publishing" aren't actually dissing or dismissing it -- in fact, I have definitely said it as well when I am for some reason talking about both types and want to make my point clear. HOWEVER, some people are offended. (OK, I'll be specific: The only place I have ever personally seen anyone be offended is on the Absolute Write forum -- which I find to be a delightful forum generally, but they are quite pedantic about this terminology!)

So: Long story short: It's called Trade Publishing. If you want to be right, call it Trade Publishing. However, if you are specifically trying to differentiate Trade Publishing from Self-Publishing, nobody will actually care if you say Traditional Publishing, unless you are around people who are being unusually pedantic.

***

*** the one that actually gets my goat WAY more than "traditional" instead of "Trade" is INDIE publishing instead of Self-Publishing. The reason for this: INDIE means something in the Trade Publishing world. INDIE BOOKSTORES are non-chain bookstores. INDIE PUBLISHERS are privately-owned publishers. Indie Bookstores and Indie Publishers have a very rough go of it in the world and are generally doing work that big corporations could and would never do; they are often daring and special, and I find it extremely annoying that some people have co-opted this language to mean something that isn't the thing it means.

Note that I AM NOT annoyed by indivuduals who are self-publishing and want to say they are "indie publishing!" or "independently publishing!" -- I was at first, 20 years ago, don't get me wrong, but this is a normal term at this point, clearly people like saying it, and it's a perfectly valid and cool thing to do if its what you want to do! So I'm not mad at those people DON'T COME AT ME.

Who I AM mad at are companies who "help" self-published authors under the guise of being "indie publishers" -- because often the people who are pushing this language are actually selling some sort of scam where they get authors to pay them a grip of money to "publish their book" when actually the authors would be better off completely doing it themselves. So they are calling themselves "INDIE PUBLISHERS" but in fact they are SCAM PUBLISHERS, SCHMUBLISHERS, VANITY PRESSES, etc, and meanwhile actual Indie Publishers got their thing taken away from them. :( -- however, the ship has kinda sailed on this, so, whatever I guess. :(

[nopefun]

Interview #495: Quince Pan

q: Give a short introduction of yourself: a: I am Quince Pan, a documentary photographer born in 2000, currently based in Singapore. I am now waiting to enter university to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics.

q: What is your series "JBM" about? What was the process of making the series? a: “JBM”, my family’s abbreviation of “Jalan Bukit Merah”, is a documentary photo project centred on my maternal grandmother, Lau Giok Niu, her cultural heritage and her HDB flat where I spent my childhood under her care. It is my first exhibited series and also my first serious long-term documentary project.

In 2015, I followed my grandmother to visit her hometown in Fengwei, Quangang District, Quanzhou City, Fujian, China. Bringing my camera along on the trip, I noticed that instead of shooting purely for fun or beauty, I would include certain objects (for example, a calendar on the wall) in my frames because they had historical significance. I submitted those Fengwei photos as my portfolio for the 2016 Noise Art Mentorship (Photography and Moving Images). I got selected, and my mentor, Jean Qingwen Loo, urged me to pursue a project which I could speak authentically about. Through her criticism, I learnt to further prioritise meaning over style. My grandmother and my childhood were topics close to my heart, especially as she cared for me during my childhood and gave me the gift of the 头北 Thâu-pak dialect, a unique variant of Hokkien from the Quangang District. Eventually, “JBM” was born as my mentorship capstone, and was exhibited at the “Between Home and Home” Noise Art Mentorship Showcase at Objectifs in 2017. I haven’t stopped shooting; that’s why it’s an ongoing long-term project!

“JBM” contains a range of visual styles, ranging from photojournalistic fly-on-the-wall documentations of heated family discussions and visits by distant relatives from China to more tender images of sunlight at the void deck where my late grandfather’s wake was held in 2006. Rituals and festivities are anthropologically significant, so I pay particular attention to Chinese New Year, the Qing Ming Festival and the Winter Solstice, which my family celebrates. I also look at how other photographers document their families: Bob Lee, Nicky Loh, Bernice Wong, Brian Teo and Nancy Borowick.

More broadly, “JBM'' extends beyond photography and is a family history project. Since 2013, I have been researching the Quangang district, 头北 Thâu-pak dialect and my grandmother’s clan. I discovered that other descendants from her clan established an ancestral temple in Singapore, which initially stood on Craig Road but is now housed in a flat in Telok Blangah. I already did some fieldwork, interviews and preliminary documentation, which led to an article I published in April 2021 in Daojia: Revista Eletrônica de Taoismo e Cultura Chinesa. Maybe I will explore this in greater depth in future photo projects!

q: How did you get into photography? a: When I was around seven years old, I loved to play with my father’s Fujifilm compact. As a young student, I hadn’t heard of terms such as “light painting”, “Dutch angle” and “rule of thirds”, but those were the techniques I subconsciously used in my photographs. 

I entered the Noise Art Mentorship, as previously mentioned. During the school holidays, I worked as a media intern at Logue and as an assistant at Objectifs for the “Passing Time” exhibition and book by Lui Hock Seng. Through these work experiences, I learnt so much from Jean Loo, Yang Huiwen, Ryan Chua, Lim Mingrui and Chris Yap: news angles, editorial writing, scanning and touching up negatives and slides, colour management for print, liaising with clients and issuing invoices, among other skills. As part of the Noise Art Mentorship, I was given a copy of “+50” by the PLATFORM collective, which opened my eyes to diverse approaches within the documentary genre. I started to regularly attend talks at Objectifs and DECK, where I got to know people in the local photography scene, particularly in the documentary tradition.

q: You also do videography. How do you see it in relation to your photography? a: Videography requires a different way of seeing and thinking compared to photography, because video has additional temporal and auditory dimensions. With photography, I don’t have to think about how long I want a scene to be, what foley and B-roll I want to overlay, or have a storyboard in my head before heading out to shoot. In that sense, photography is more reactive to and receptive of situational contingencies because it requires less pre-planning. 

Also, photography can be a solitary endeavour, but it is quite difficult to make films alone, and the schoolmates I used to make films with have since embarked on separate paths in life. However, photography and videography share the same basics as visual media: composition and sequencing.

Fundamentally, I see myself as a documentarian, and this applies to any medium I work in, be it photography or videography, or even writing. The end goal is to record and share history by telling stories from lesser-known perspectives. Thus, the topics of my video projects are similar to the topics of my photo projects; sometimes I do both side by side! The films I made were all documentary shorts of places which do not exist anymore, such as the Hup Lee coffee shop at 114 Jalan Besar and the old Sembawang Hot Spring before NParks took over the site from MINDEF and redeveloped it. 

Currently, I am working as a videographer for Sing Lit Station’s poetry.sg archive. Thankfully, this job can be done solo!

q: What or who is inspiring you right now? a: Bob Lee, for being an amazing father and spreading hope and joy to others through his images. Alex and Rebecca Webb, for pairing literature with photography. Tom Brenner, for approaching photojournalism like street photography. Sim Chi Yin, for her international achievements and being both an academic and a practitioner. Brian Teo, for being an eminent contemporary. Last but not least, Kevin WY Lee’s advice, “CPR: Craft, Point, Rigour”, which I try to benchmark my work against.

q: Upcoming projects or ideas? a: Nothing concrete on my mind so far. I am just going to see where life takes me and what topics life makes me want to explore or talk about.

q: Any music to recommend? a: First and foremost, my fight song: “倔强 Stubborn” by Mayday. A close second, Queen’s 1986 “Under Pressure” live performance at Wembley is a transformative experience. The catchy “他夏了夏天 He Summered Summer” by Sodagreen brings out the grandeur in the mundane. “Silhouette” by KANA-BOON and “Everybody’s Changing” by Keane remind me of the fragility of life and time. I also like The Fray, Kings of Leon, Last Dinosaurs, Stephanie Sun, Tanya Chua, and the Taiwanese indie band DSPS.

his website.

Get more updates on our Facebook page and Instagram.

[goblincow]

Thanks @theresattrpgforthat for the opportunity, glad to oblige!

The Perilous Pear & Plum Pies of Pudwick (TPPAPPOP) is a special upcoming full-colour issue of The Undercroft published by the Melsonian Arts Council compatible with all your favourite indie dungeon-crawlers!

Initially announced as The Undercroft #13, I've since moved house three times, gotten covid three times and had the equivalent of a part time job fighting with the Department for Work and Pensions for disability support for myself and my partner - so since it was first announced nearly three years ago progress has been stop and start!

However the end is in sight as I'm wrapping up the last of the illustrations, all hand drawn and digitally coloured in a limited palette like this one:

So what's the book about?!

Well, here's my working blurb!

A well-meaning outsider brings reckless colonial magic into a small community on the eve of the local bake off. Hijinks ensue as chitinous consequence follows behind on a thousand scuttling limbs.

Explore the dawn of a new insectoid world ripe for adventure! Shrink down to size and take your first furtive steps into a brand new world living inside a sapient pear tree filled to the brim with insect NPCs, communities & conflicts and their (relatively) ancient secrets.

Unravel the mystery at the heart of the tree, and make your (proportionately) tiny mark - will you do more harm than good in these dawning civilisations, and how will you ever decide the destiny of a world that was never yours to discover?

The first handful of pages invite players into the inciting chaos at the food festival, and the rest of the book is a hexflower labyrinth-crawl inside the tree. But the clock is ticking: you'd better get in and out before you rapidly grow back to regular size - an explosive & messy demise for you, the tree and the world inside!

Each hex contains an evocative location description and a d4 table of encounters or d3 table of vignettes that hold all manner of weird-fantasy wonders. There are various deeply interconnected factions active in the tree, from the empire of the ants contesting the ladybirds for control of the aphid farms, to the Pear Republic citizens who live under the grip of the infamous Stinking Bishop, to the ragtag group of outcast adventurers whose staging ground is a half-buried porcelain gnome.

Smart, easy to reference layout has been a really important pillar of my design process from the beginning - my very first draft actually directly copied the style of Old School Essentials adventures, but I've massively developed on the reading experience a lot since I began to hit the best of both worlds re: reading experience and table usability, with a rainbow of limited colour illustrations and a focus on short compelling prose with matching coloured/bolded key-words for easy reference throughout the book.

If you enjoyed the world of Hollow Knight and are very patiently waiting for Silksong (like me!), and if you enjoyed Bug Fables, Honey I Shrunk The Kid, or another big inspiration of mine - The Legend of Zelda: Minish Cap - then this is the book that's going to scratch those bug-lovin' itches just right! Keep an eye out for anything I tag with #TPPAPPOP on this closing stretch (just a couple of months left I think) to know when the book is finally available!

--------

If you want to know more, pick a page number from 3-51 (I made good use of the back inside cover with a loot table directly inspired by the fantastic I Search The Body table in the Mothership module Dead Planet) and I'll give a little excerpt!

This is without a doubt the best writing and illustration work I've ever done so I'd love an opportunity to share it - thanks to @rathayibacter for the idea!

The Perilous Pear & Plum Pies of Pudwick, pg. 36

release date: TBC

publisher: Melsonia (The Undercroft special full-colour 48 page fully-illustrated issue)

format: oldschool-style weird fantasy hexcrawl adventure compatible with all oldschool systems

genre: shrink to insectoid size and adventure into the uncanny world that exists inside a sapient, talking pear tree

this image is fresh from the exports folder - project links and full pitch to follow in future pinned posts

[ghostsofmemories]

Writing My Obituary (context on my weird poetry collection)

I realized today that I very casually bring up my poetry collection all the time and a large majority of my followers have no clue what I’m talking about, so here’s a WMO explanation post thing! I should definitely give a content warning though: this book deals with suicide, abuse (both physical and emotional, by both parents and other people), homophobia and transphobia, allusions to major appetite and stomach issues (which while reading sound a lot like eating disorders), toxic relationships, just a lot of really heavy emotions in general. Please don’t read the book or this post if those things could trigger you. This post also ended up super long, so the rest is under the cut.

So. first thing’s first, this collection is being published by Pure Print Publishing this fall (due to covid there aren’t any exact dates available). I didn’t query it, someone reached out to me after reading my poems on Instagram, hearing that they were in an unpublished collection, and basically connected me with their friend who runs the indie publishing house and is an author himself.

A big part of the reason this book is so difficult to talk about in context is because that requires getting pretty vulnerable - most of this book is just me dealing with everything I’ve struggled with over the last 4 years of my life. So if there’s discussion about the book in the replies, please keep it to the content of the book and not the validity of these experiences or details of things that happened to me.

The collection is about me and my journey from 13 to 17, starting with my suicide attempt at 13. There are several poems from around that time in my life, but they’ve changed a lot over the four years of editing. However, you can definitely still see changes in the way I write and the way I approach poetry by the end of the book - which was the goal. The book is centered around learning about identity, about how relationships should work, about friendships, about learning to handle mental and chronic illness, and above all, growing. There’s really no “breaking point” where everything about the way I write changes all at once, so in context, the change is almost difficult to see. So to sort of represent these changes, I’m putting a poem from the beginning, from the middle, and from the end all right next to each other (and some bonus analysis of my own poetry!).

Call me a monster is probably the most stark change from the past to the present. I almost never rhyme my poems anymore and if I do, they’re fleeting and mostly for rhythm. The lines are also extremely short, which I only do now when it really fits - in general, I make an effort to avoid consistently short lines. I like to tell myself that it’s symbolism I did on purpose to represent how all over the place my brain was, hopping from one thought to the next, but I don’t think it’s symbolism. I think my brain was really too jumbled to have more than five words in a line.

 I also took my own poems very seriously back then - writing a poem was an Occasion, so the first letter of each of those lines is capitalized like I’m some sort of English classics major. Both stanzas are also the same length (I still do that now sometimes, but back then it was in so many of my poems that I think I thought it was a requirement). Basically, I wrote this like I was going to turn it in somewhere.

Still pretty heavy on the capitalization here, but I definitely got more flexible with stanza length and slightly longer lines (7 whole words, yay!). This poem was somewhat of a turning point for me, basically realizing that I could not only vent through poetry, but still make it poetic and artistic in a lot of ways, and also explore contrast in my own emotions and conflicting feelings. For some reason, prior to this, I thought a poem could only be one emotion at a time, but now I think a poem can be one topic and the way multiple or conflicting emotions revolve around it. This is also one of the first poems I wrote that I was proud of from beginning to end.

This poem isn’t totally representative of the last couple changes I want to talk about (especially line length - for being relatively recent the lines are still pretty short), but I don’t want to use too many poems that haven’t been posted online before and this one has been posted and read aloud on an Instagram live, minus one stanza I added, which I’ll get to. I also wanted to choose this one because it has a direct reference to The Universe In You and several other poems, which gives me a chance to talk about how much I love referencing my other poetry in my poetry. Buckle up, this one might be long.

By this point, I had pretty much realized that there actually aren’t any rules at all. I’ve figured out what I want to say and I’ll say it however the hell I want to - I don’t need to capitalize things unless it suits the form, I don’t have to be totally consistent, I can repeat things as much as I want. I reached back into my 15 year old angst for this one, though, so I could more properly write about the relationship in a way that made sense. 

Now, I could honestly write a whole other book about how I reference other poems in each poem, but for now I’ll just break down the ones here.

Sort of a half reference right at the beginning: I have so much to say. I bring that up in different words in so many poems, both about my relationship and my dad. This is probably because, growing up as someone who had a speech impediment (meaning I talked too much no matter how little I said because of how long it took to say it), I always felt like I never had the space to say everything I wanted. It’s brought up in at least 3 other poems.

lost signals: a direct reference to my poem Thread Unavailable:

We’re riding down a dirt road in the middle of a conversation and lost signal. Message failed.

empty spaces: a reference to The Universe In You!! Pretty much the whole reason I included this poem.

burned poems: this one is basically just a reference to all the poems in the collection that are breakup poems, or poems where I directly addressed my ex saying don’t read this, you don’t have to read this, I shouldn’t have written this, etc. Specifically, A Long and Lonely Letter, Tired Eyed (The Homecoming Poem), and The Poem That Shouldn’t Exist.

another July come and gone and I didn’t write about you: this reference is hard to really understand the context of unless you know me in real life, but in two other poems I mention the month of July, in a couple others I reference summer, but there are dozens of poems that didn’t make it into my cut of the collection that talk about July. Basically, in context of the relationship, it was the only time we were actually happy and we split up and got back together over and over trying to replicate that fleeting, 30 day feeling that was overtaken by school, seasonal depression, and our own instability as people. For so long, all I could think about was that one month, and that line was my way of showing how I was done writing about it.

you told me, once, that we’re soulmates: this entire little stanza is directly copied from Tired Eyed (The Homecoming Poem). In order to continue talking about it I’ll throw a piece of that here:

If you want to come back, be sure of me. Be sure of yourself. I don’t want to be a consequence of your impulses.

You told me, once, that we’re soulmates. That once you find a person you want to spend forever with, it feels like nothing else matters. Do you believe that like I do?

That’s just a really short chunk of a really long poem, but basically the re-use of that section goes to say that me truly believing nothing else mattered was not good and extremely unhealthy. I put it there even though the poem was just fine without it because I really wanted to get that message across, especially since most of my target audience falls between middle and high school.

I know love in so many shades and I give it in every color: this references a couple different poems that aren’t in the collection, but in terms of the book, it’s a reference to Red, Like You, which is about color association and love and stuff? I I still don’t totally get it. I say in the poem that I don’t totally get it. No one totally gets it, but all in all I went from loving just one person in just one way to loving everyone in tons of different ways and realizing that those other types of love are just as, if not more, fulfilling to me, and that romance is not the be-all end-all of love and happiness.

All the other references are repetitions so I’ve pretty much already explained those. But anyway, that’s my book! It has 77 poems total, quite a few of them more than a page, and some that are probably several pages once in paperback format because, you know, I never shut up. Since I did my mini beta reading round (I got a lot of necessary feedback but that was so much to keep track of, I’ll probably just get a couple feedback partners next time), I’ve cut 34 poems and added 16 newer ones, edited the crap out of the whole book, and gotten the perspective of a professional editor.

 This book, even though there’s a lot of it I’ve grown out of, is super important to me and it’s so hard to let it go. Part of me wants to keep this book going forever and just keep growing until it has thousands of poems, but all of these “character arcs” in my life are finished. I left my toxic relationship and friendships, I figured out my gender and sexuality, I learned how to love openly, I cut off my dad for good. There’s obviously always more to learn about my relationships with these other people and myself, and I do that unconsciously every day. But in all honesty, I have nothing left to say about these people or events that would change the conclusions I’ve already come to - they would only further prove them to be true.

I absolutely always want to talk about this book, so if you have any questions, send an ask! Also feel free to scroll through the poetry tag on my blog and ask me about any poems I have posted there, there are a few that I’ve written since the completion of the collection that’ll (most likely) end up in whatever I write next. Basically, I’m obsessed with poetry and want to talk about it all the time. Please ask me about it.

[diverse-writing]

hi! i was wondering if you knew what would be an appropriate wage to pay a sensitivity reader to read a fanfic?

I absolutely adore this question and this initiative. While the mainstream publishing book industry is slooowwwwly growing more comfortable with utilizing sensitivity writers, usage remains relatively rare in other publication avenues (short stories, fiction magazines, self-publication, etc.) Introducing that level of mindfulness into writing/reading fanfiction is really admirable and helps normalize sensitivity readers as another step in the editing process, just like beta readers. On top of that, your initiative to compensate sensitivity readers for their important work demonstrates your clear commitment to writing respectful diversity and recognizing the value of those who help you get there. I can’t say enough how cool it is that you’re reaching out about this.

As to your question itself, I don’t have a solid answer nor personal experience but I do have some references. Let’s look at some professional sensitivity readers’ rates to get an idea of how much their services go for.

Quiethouse Editing’s “minimum rate is $100. Full-length texts usually fall between $0.005 and $0.007 per word, per reader.”

Patrice Williams Marks, author of So You Want to Be a Sensitivity Reader?, charges “a minimum charge of $75 for works under 1000 words” with a case-by-case basis for longer works.

Dax Murray asks “a base $50 for the first 5,000 words. For every word after that I charge an additional $0.0025, rounded up to the nearest cent.”  However, fei also write “if you cannot afford my rates and are an indie author or an author who has not yet been published before, I am willing to work out alternative means of compensations (for example, you crochet? I will accept a scarf as payment!).”

Alice of Arctic Books charges $50 for <20000 words, $200 for 20001-60000 words, $250 for 60001-100000 words, and negotiable rates for 100000+ words. Like Murray, she is “willing to negotiate if you are an indie author or a teen author.”

Mary Robinette Kowal, author of The Calculating Stars among other works, pays her sensitivity readers $3 per page. I do want to note that she herself isn’t a sensitivity reader but rather an author within the mainstream publishing industry who’s very open about her usage of sensitivity readers.

Writing Diversely’s Sensitivity Reader Directory features many readers with a variety of rates, though most tend to charge in the ballpark of $250 for a novel-length work.

Obviously, there’s a fair amount of variety here, as well as a bit of flexibility for non-professional writers. None of these sensitivity writers come cheap, more so if you’re writing extended novel-length fanfic rather than one-shots.

All that being said, I doubt you’re seeking out a professional sensitivity writer. I do think these numbers are useful to keep in mind during your search but understand that these are professionals with experience within the industry and in many cases, extensive education in media representation of various identities. In your case, you should look for a sensitivity reader who a) has personal experience with your topic(s) (race, disability, sexuality, religion, etc.) b) is knowledgable about the representation of that topic within fiction and nonfiction media c) understands and is willing to undertake the emotional labor intrinsic to sensitivity reading and finally d) is involved with the fandom in question so they understand the context your fanfic is written within.

Ideally, you find someone who has functioned as a sensitivity reader before and understands everything it entails. If you find someone who matches many of the above suggestions but hasn’t worked as a sensitivity reader before, I’d be sure to direct them to some resources on the profession so they know what’s expected of them and what they’re getting into (including an overview of professional sensitivity reader’s rates, so you both understand the value of good sensitivity reading). While I don’t think either of you should expect to work with a professional rate, it’s nevertheless a good reference. 

From there, you two can discuss payment, taking into account both your personal budget and their experience. If they have prior sensitivity experience, that should be reflected in their payment. If you think this is going to be a one-off arrangement, a lump sum fee is probably the most reasonable; if you plan to write additional works within the fandom that would likewise need sensitivity reading, you two can discuss a standing agreement and work out a per word rate.

I know I didn’t really provide a solid answer to your question but I hope that helps nevertheless. Best of luck to you and your writing!

[letterboxd]

The Last Artists.

“From the outside it seems like this dream scenario… but the truth is it took years working on drafts and wondering if anyone would ever read them.” —Joe Talbot on The Last Black Man in San Francisco.

A love story to San Francisco, to one grand Victorian house in particular, and to a life-long friendship, The Last Black Man in San Francisco was many years in the making. And it paid off: Joe Talbot picked up the Best Director prize at Sundance 2019 for his debut feature, a story drawn from the life of his best friend (and the film’s leading man), Jimmie Fails. A close-knit family of creatives grew around the project, and became a vital support system for Talbot when his father had a stroke just weeks before the shoot. Since January, critical accolades for the film have snowballed. Most recently, it appeared in our ten highest-rated features for the first half of 2019.

Letterboxd reporter Jack Moulton took the opportunity for a lengthy chat with Talbot about his remarkable debut feature. The interview contains a virtual masterclass in first-time feature film development (and the persistence required to see it through), along with some never-before-seen images shared exclusively with us by Joe. Also: some plot spoilers, which we’ve left until the very end.

Joe Talbot and Jimmie Fails in 2014, photographed by Talbot’s brother, Nat Talbot.

Thanks for agreeing to a good chat with us. Are you on Letterboxd? We have our suspicions that you might be. Joe Talbot: Yeah. I love it. I found Letterboxd before we shot the movie. I use it to save movies to watch for later and look up movies people recommend. Occasionally I read the reviews of films I’ve just watched, they’re often really thoughtful.

Can we share your username? You could be the next Sean Baker. The one I have right now is more of a lurking profile so it’s not very formal. I made one that’s a little more presentable for you under my name.

Are you in San Francisco right now? I am. If you can hear my heavy breathing, I’m actually walking up one of the steeper hills that Jimmie and Montgomery crest in the movie and see the skyline. That’s what I do for every interview, I like to walk up the hill to put me in the film. Just kidding, this is the first time I’ve done it. I’m just walking with a friend and we’re about two thirds of the way up. Woo!

We’ve just published our halfway top 10 of the year. The Last Black Man in San Francisco is in second place, between Avengers: Endgame and Booksmart. How does this make you feel, and how do you cope with reviews (whether they’re full of praise or criticism)? Wow, that means a lot. I find the reviews informative, though have to admit I don’t read too many of them. In general, it’s great to know that there are people that love movies enough to get into debates and write passionately, either about how much they loved them or didn’t like them at all. Having platforms like Letterboxd and finding those communities online can be really great, even if they’re not made up of people in your city.

Given that the film has relatively low stakes—it’s not life or death, it’s house or no-house—what gave you confidence that audiences would connect to Jimmie’s story? I don’t know if we were ever confident. You never fully know. You hope that if you share something that has meaning to you then it will have meaning to others. That was our guiding light.

We finished the movie four days before the Sundance screening, so that was the first time watching it with any audience. I looked over at [Plan B producer] Jeremy Kleiner when the movie ended; he said “the tweets are good”. I looked around and realized the whole audience were on their phone as soon as the credits rolled.

I only had a short film play at Sundance before [American Paradise in 2017, also starring Jimmie Fails] so I didn’t realize part of our culture now is the need to immediately respond to something—but luckily they were nice. It will be much more anxiety-inducing going into my next feature now that I know how all this works.

We wanted to make something that captured the San Francisco that we grew up in and feel very strongly about. We’ve travelled to Chicago, DC, New York, LA, and Atlanta with the film and I was surprised to see how much people were connecting to it. In a way, Jimmie and I say it is unfortunately universal because it means the same things are happening everywhere.

This idea has lived with you and Jimmie for a long time. Can you talk us through the journey of the film? We’ve been informally talking about it for at least seven years and it’s gone through so many incarnations. We always envisioned it as the first feature that Jimmie and I would make after many years of making short films together. This story felt big enough in scope and there was a lot that we wanted to cover.

We wanted to tell a story about Jimmie and this Victorian home he once lived in and make it a valentine to the San Francisco we grew up in, that we see as being lost. We also wanted to celebrate all the wonderful people who are here that make this city what it is. That’s a big part of what we are afraid of losing: the very people that make San Francisco ‘San Francisco’.

An alternative poster for the film, illustrated by Akiko Stehrenberger.

We both lived with my parents for five years—we ran our operation out of the living room there. The first thing we did was shoot a concept trailer for Vimeo. It was a five-minute piece of Jimmie skating through the city telling his grandfather’s story, much like the [feature’s] opening sequence, though I filmed it hanging out of the side of my brother’s car.

Afterwards we got emails from people saying they wanted to help; they would become our core collaborators on the film. Khaliah Neal, Rob Richert, Luis Alfonso de la Parra, Natalie Teter, Sydney Lowe, Prentice Sanders, Fritzi Adelman, Laila Bahman and Ryan Doubiago. They spent years with us, hashing out the script over my parents’ kitchen table and working with us to create a look-book, run an ambitious Kickstarter campaign, write grant proposals and so on.

We felt like these oddballs—the last artists in San Francisco. You get a lot of noes along the way, having never made a movie before, so it was the emotional support that helped us persist through the difficult times. We were excited to be learning together, as a group of mostly first-timers, and were constantly making things.

Our look-book was very elaborate, thanks to our stills photographer Laila Bahman. We built it as a website and staged the scenes as if we were filming the movie, with costumes and heavy art direction. We knew people we pitched were probably seeing materials from other filmmakers who were further in their careers and probably better writers than us. We knew we needed to show the world of the movie so that executives’ imaginations wouldn’t be running off with thoughts of Michael B. Jordan or Donald Glover; that this is Jimmie and this is the plaid shirt we want him in and this is his Victorian. It’s his story.

That helped us get into the Screenwriter’s Lab at Sundance, but I didn’t get into the Director’s Lab, which I was initially bummed about because I really needed that experience. Our Kickstarter was very successful and those backers created a grassroots ground-swelling around the movie that pushed it forward, even though it was difficult in pitch meetings as we weren’t the most bankable pair in such a risk-averse industry.

In a last-ditch effort, my crew and I decided to do our own Director’s Lab instead. We felt if it doesn’t work now then that might be it for Last Black Man. I’d never made a proper short with a budget before but a producer named Tamir Muhammad, who had a short-lived venture within Time Warner called OneFifty, gave us the money to make what would become American Paradise. It gave the crew a chance to get in the trenches together before moving on to a feature, and show the potential of what we could do.

The team who’d assembled from our concept trailer years before all worked on American Paradise, from Khaliah Neal, Rob Richert and Luis Alfonso down the line. We worked with production designer Jona Tochet and even the sound team of Sage and Corinne (who would all go on to work on Last Black Man). In a city increasingly devoid of artists, we felt we’d found our people.

The short was different from Last Black Man, but features Jimmie playing the same character. After it played in Sundance it got the attention of Plan B’s Christina Oh. They took a big leap of faith on us, only having ever made that short. There’s not a lot of people willing to do that.

Khaliah, Christina and Jeremy approached A24 and we were in production two months later. From the outside it seems like this dream scenario of having the incredible indie studios Plan B and A24 behind us, but the truth is it took years working on drafts and wondering if anyone would ever read them. I think the extra time we had helped, because if we had the chance to make it two or three years ago, I don’t think we would have been ready.

Jimmie Fails and the creative team behind ‘The Last Black Man in San Francisco’ at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. / Photo: Sue Peri

What was the first movie you made with Jimmie when you were teenagers? The first half-decent thing we made was a movie that my brother and I co-directed called Last Stop Livermore. I am actually in it alongside Jimmie and that was my first and only time in front of the camera. I learned my place pretty early on.

Didn’t you have a cameo in Last Black Man? I swear I saw you. I did have a cameo. As long as I’m not speaking, I’m okay. But even then when I just had to look at Jimmie once it was very difficult for me to do. I needed four takes for that shot, ha ha. I’m much more comfortable on the other side.

Jimmie, however, was really good in [Last Stop Livermore]. We made it while I was in high school before I dropped out, and it got into the San Francisco International Film Festival. Like everything we do, it’s based on something that happened in real life when a friend and I felt like we were fish out of water, going off to meet some girls in the suburbs.

That attention the film got, however minor, encouraged us because until that point only our family, friends and my high school teacher had seen our movies. Oh and Jimmie still had a flat-top—just thought I should add.

The film features the most important house of the year [Editor’s note: at least until the rest of the world sees the Parasite house, designed by the great Namgoong]. How did you find Jimmie’s house and what made it the house? It took us over a year and a half to find the house. We combed the streets with my co-producer Luis Alfonso de la Parra and production designer Jona Tochet and knocked on doors. In hindsight, a more efficient way would have been to use Google Maps but this way we could see inside the houses.

Unfortunately, the interiors would usually be gutted and have IKEA furniture and granite table tops. As a filmmaker, it was depressing, but as a native San Franciscan it was heartbreaking because the details inside all these beautiful houses were destroyed. It’s a thing that a lot of real estate agents do when they flip houses.

We ended up going back to a house that I had driven past as a kid on my way to elementary school. My mom, my brother and I would pick out our dream Victorian houses on our family car ride since we couldn't afford a proper one. I went back to one of the houses that had always stuck with me. After we found that house, it felt like we had cast a major character in the movie.

When we first knocked on the door of the house that would become Jimmie's home in the film, an older gentlemen greeted us and within seconds beckoned us inside. As we entered, we found a home that had not been gutted, but instead had been lovingly restored. Jim, the homeowner, much like Jimmie, the actor, had spent more than half of his life working on the house.

He carved the witch hat you see in the movie shingle by shingle and did the honor of putting it on the roof himself. He fixed the organs you see in the film and built Pope's hole in the library. In many ways, he felt like the spirit of San Francisco.

As a now elderly man, we would have understood him declining our wants to film there -- or charging a buttload to help him in his retirement. Instead he welcomed our big crew into his house and charged us next to nothing. I still don't fully know why, but I can imagine he saw shades of himself in Jimmie's love for this Victorian.

In the years we spent location scouting, we would also meet people on the street that we put in the movie. Dakecia Chappell was working at a Whole Foods in the confectionery section, near a ‘potential Jimmie’s house’ around the corner and she was just really charming, so I offered her the ‘Candy Lady’ part in the film. We met the mover who tells Jimmie the homeowners are moving out late one night at a taqueria on Mission Street. This extra time allowed us to capture the little details of what our San Francisco is like.

Even after your major backing from Plan B and A24, was there a point on set where it felt like everything was falling apart? I’m sure there are directors that aren’t plagued by the self-doubt I had. I didn’t go to film school and I felt isolated in San Francisco since a lot of the filmmakers have left for Los Angeles or New York. I was feeling this imposter syndrome. You’re both really joyous and grateful that you finally have a chance to make a movie, but also feel the weight of the city and wanting to honor what’s happening to people there. In every stage you have big and little freak-outs. The only thing that got me through it were the people around me. They bring perspective when you might not have it.

A couple of months before we shot the film my dad had a stroke. He survived, thankfully, and he would say half-jokingly “I survived to see the movie”. My parents struggled as artists themselves in their lives and yet they created this loving home that allowed us to make the movie. I look up to my Dad a lot, so when that happened that was really scary, and it happened during the height of the pandemonium of prep.

By that point our creative collaborators felt like family and they did everything for us. They came over to my house, brought us food, did as much as they could to take work off my plate so I could be with my own family. That always sticks with me when I remember tough times. You could say it’s just a job, but they treated it like so much more. So while it sounds corny, I think the spirit which comes with people being so loving and kind becomes imbued in the film.

Very glad to hear your dad is okay. The scenes with Jimmie’s parents are so powerful; you really get a greater sense of his isolation. It’s amazing his mom agreed to be in the film as a fictionalized version of herself. How did you and Jimmie sketch those scenes? The scene with his mom is loosely based on something that happened. Jimmie was raised mostly by his dad and he’s very close to his parents now in a way that’s very different from the relationship that he had with them growing up. He and his dad have worked through a lot.

Jimmie Fails as Jimmie. This and the header photo are by Laila Bahman.

It’s hard to pack in all the complex details that makes someone who they are because you don’t have enough screen time to do that sometimes. These elements were pulled from the walks we’d take during the earliest developments when the idea was more informal and we’d talk about Jimmie’s family.

One story that Jimmie always recalled both humorously but also quite painfully was about the guy who had driven off in the car that he and his dad were living in at the time. We thought it would be funny if there was a character who never acknowledged that he’d stolen the car but claimed that he was still borrowing it. We knew Mike Epps would be the perfect person for that. It was a story that came from a kernel of truth but took on a life of its own.

Why was Jimmie’s dad pirating The Patriot, of all movies? The tonal juxtaposition made us laugh. Ha ha, it was in the public domain.

We loved the score. What are some of the soundtracks that inspired you while making the film? The Last of the Mohicans, The Day of the Dolphin, The Claim, Batman (and also the animated TV show’s score actually rivals Elfman’s), and Far From the Madding Crowd.

You’ve spoken in another interview about how you and Jimmie fear friendships like yours aren’t possible with the type of gentrification that’s going on. However, nowadays you can meet some of the important people in your life over the internet. Could the bonds we make online compensate for what’s being lost on the streets? I think the internet is a double-edged sword. It both brings people together that you could never have met, such as how many of our closest collaborators first found our concept trailer online. But I do fear it also plays a part in people developing shallower, less intimate connections. I have friends who I love who will go to events seemingly just to get a good Instagram photo out of it. I’m sure I’ve suffered from similar instincts. That scares me.

Montgomery adds so much tenderness and insight to the film. Given he’s Jimmie’s best friend and he’s also an artist, is he your avatar in the movie? How did the casting of Jonathan Majors inform the development of his character? Montgomery is actually not based on me. Jimmie and I have a friend from the Bay named Prentice Sanders who is one of the more original people we’ve ever met. His spirit influenced the first shades of the character. When Jon came on he took those early sketchings to a whole new level, creating his own backstory, mannerisms, and interests.

On the vanity in his room, Jon decided to put up Tennessee Williams, August Wilson, Barbara Stanwyck, Canada Lee, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison as inspiration. He had a hand in every little detail. In fact, Jon and Jimmie became very close in real life. They still talk nearly every day.

Warning: the last section of the interview contains spoilers, including for the endings of both ‘Last Black Man’ and ‘Ghost World’. This is your last chance to back out…

How do you direct Jimmie? I imagine you can read each other’s minds at this point. Yeah, there is a weird unspoken connection between us, as we grew up together. Knowing each other for so long allowed us to be vulnerable around each other. As a director, inevitably there are days on set that are stressful, scary, and tense, so being able to go for a walk around the block together to recalibrate and feel present was helpful.

This film asked something much different than anything we had done before. We’d never written a feature script and most of our shorts were ad-libbed. Honestly, everyone broke their backs to make this. Cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra was a hero. Nobody phoned it in.

But more than anybody, we asked the most of Jimmie. There’s a scene where he’s across from his real mother and the bravery from both of them to do that set a tone that everyone on set sought to honor.

Joe Talbot and Jimmie Fails on the set of ‘The Last Black Man in San Francisco’. Photo by the film’s cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra.

Your collaboration with Jimmie has been so strong for such a long time. Is it a relief for you or maybe a sadness that this phase with him is nearly over? It doesn’t feel like it’s over yet, but I’m sure when it does there will be a little bit of sadness. The movie continues to sell out theaters on a Wednesday afternoon in San Francisco and opened in the little neighborhood theaters that indies barely make it into and it's playing alongside Toy Story. There’s a feeling in the city now that’s hopeful.

It’s been wonderful to witness because I feel like we’ve been working through our feelings about San Francisco in making the movie, and in some ways Jimmie leaving at the end feels a bit like us, how perhaps we can’t be here anymore. I’ve only ever lived in San Francisco my entire life but maybe it is time to go somewhere else.

However, in putting the movie out there I’ve seen so many more natives that feel like people I grew up with 15-20 years ago. People who I thought had been lost but are still out there, fighting to exist somehow through all the changes. I feel like part of me is falling back in love with San Francisco again and I think that feeling is going to go on for a long time.

A lot of people are contacting us saying that they left the theater and they just started writing their own scripts, or writing poetry, or sending us paintings that were inspired by the movie. In a city that is increasingly difficult to exist in as an artist and not always inspiring, this always means something to us.

On the film’s ending: to you, where is Jimmie going? Jimmie is going to start his legacy somewhere else—to fully be himself and start anew, following the footsteps of his grandfather. And it’s more fun to shoot it that way than have him ride away on a BART train.

One interpretation of the ending we’ve heard is that it was all in Mont’s head, and in “reality” it ended on a more tragic note. So some viewers felt it as hopeless, but you in fact intended it to be more hopeful? I think we wanted to leave it open to interpretation. I talked to Thora Birch [who has a small role in Last Black Man] about the ending of Ghost World, because that always left an impression on me. I interpreted it as a suicide when I saw it as a teenager and she had told me that she felt that way about it too, but there are also people who thought she was going off to art school. I feel our ending works in the same way.

I don’t see any interpretation of it as invalid, but what your relationship is to your city affects what you bring to it. Either way it’s a bittersweet ending, because it is a loss for Jimmie and Mont’s friendship, and for the city. Like, San Francisco doesn’t deserve him anymore.

Discover the films that inspired the look and feel of ‘The Last Black Man in San Francisco’.

[peckhampeculiar]

Unsung heroes

Words: Rebecca Thomson; Photo: Cate Gillon/Getty Images

There are over 100,000 war memorials in the UK, but only one has been dedicated to African and Caribbean soldiers. Unveiled on Windrush Square in Brixton in 2017, it was met with surprise by those it was designed to honour. Alan Wilmot, a WW2 veteran who served in the Royal Navy and lived in south London, told the BBC: “I did not dream I would be around to see things like this happening.”

For years, little has been done to make people aware of the crucial role played by these men and women. Many faced the same horrors of war as their white counterparts while also coping with institutional racism. There are few letters and diaries from these soldiers and the records of the British West Indies Regiment were apparently lost in a WW2 air raid.

From academic history to the entertainment and publishing industries, the stories told about the wars are missing a large part of the picture. Peckham historian and author Stephen Bourne, whose most recent book Black Poppies is about the wider contribution of black WW1 servicemen and women, says: “The subject has been ignored by historians and chroniclers for such as long time that there’s very sparse information.

“These soldiers also came from a generation that was seen and not heard - they weren’t encouraged to talk about their lives. It is only now, with the Windrush scandal, that people are becoming interested.”

The national narrative surrounding the ethnicity of British soldiers in WW1 and WW2 has been whitewashed. But without African and Caribbean soldiers, as well as the Indian army and other soldiers from across Asia, both wars could have ended differently.

Alan Wakefield, Head of First World War and Early Twentieth Century at the Imperial War Museum, says: “The numbers are significant. It would have been very difficult to win a number of the campaigns the British were fighting without these soldiers.” The museum is hosting an installation called the African Soldier by artist John Akomfrah until March 2019, but Wakefield says that even an institution like IWM, with access to resource and expertise, has found it hard to breathe life into the stories of black soldiers.

“Immediately after the first world war, the empire’s contribution and a lot of these stories got overlooked. Even our collections here - we’ve got some good materials, but we’re quite short of 3D objects, letters and diaries from black servicemen. There’s very little directly relating to the soldiers themselves.” There are hundreds of photographs, he adds, but relatively little to explore the stories of the people in them, because so little was saved.

It’s difficult to measure the number of African servicemen who served, but they were spread all over the world and around two million were thought to be involved during WW1 alone. Around 15,500 Caribbean troops volunteered in WW1, including 10,000 from Jamaica. In the second world war around 16,000 troops volunteered, with 6,000 serving in the RAF.

With so many stories lost, it is vital to remember those we do have. Sam King, who lived in Peckham until his death in 2016, served in the second world war as an engineer in the RAF. He returned to Britain in 1948 on the Empire Windrush - around a third of the boat’s original cohort were WW2 veterans.

He went on to raise a family in the borough, worked for the Post Office for 34 years, and became a community activist. He worked with Claudia Jones to set up the Notting Hill Carnival and was involved with Britain’s first black newspaper the West Indian Gazette. He campaigned on migrant welfare issues and in 1982 was elected as the first black mayor of Southwark, a role his granddaughter Dione McDonald, who lives in Herne Hill, said was among his proudest achievements.

“I would go to the market with my grandad, and the Cypriot shopkeepers would call him Mr Mayor years after he was. They said he was still their mayor. People called him that until the year he passed away and he still felt proud of it. For him it wasn’t just a superficial role, it was finding a way for everybody to have a voice, ensuring everyone was represented and their needs were being met.

“His story is unique - he came at a time when there was a real awakening of the British civil rights movement.”

King also set up the Windrush Foundation with Arthur Torrington in 1996, with the aim of fundraising and organising for the 50th anniversary of the Empire Windrush’s arrival. “We decided to set it up for the 50th anniversary,” Arthur Torrington says.

“And from then we have moved it to be a national thing.” He says the aim of the organisation now is to improve knowledge of and education around the Windrush and other migrant stories, particularly in schools. “Our goal is to have it taught in every school, helping youngsters to understand their ancestors.”

Caribbean stories have come to the fore recently, as the country celebrated the 70th anniversary of the Empire Windrush arriving at Tilbury docks. Many of the former servicemen and women who arrived on the boat settled in South London.

Post-WW2, they were joined by veterans from across the world. In 1948 the government passed the Commonwealth Act, giving people throughout the empire full British citizenship and the right to move to the UK. Veterans from India, European countries such as Poland, and African countries from Gambia to Ghana chose to make their home in the country they fought for.

It is difficult to gauge how many veterans made their way here, but it is safe to assume, given the millions of Indian, African and European people who served on Britain’s behalf, that they made up a significant number of the post-war population shift, and arrived not as immigrants, but as British citizens.

“Not only did they support the country in two world wars, they came back afterwards and helped to rebuild it,” Bourne says.

The post-war generation were not the first to arrive, however. Dr Harold Moody moved to London from Kingston, Jamaica in 1904 to study medicine at King’s College, but despite being fully qualified was denied a job at a hospital. He set up his own GP practice in King’s Grove, Peckham, moving to Queens Road a few years later and living there with his wife Olive and their six children.

Having suffered appalling racism during his career, Moody dedicated his free time to campaigning to make Britain a fairer place. Among other things, he fought for black servicemen to be able to rise above the rank of sergeant - one of his sons, Charles Arundel Moody, went on to become a colonel in WW2.

In 1931, Harold Moody formed the League of Coloured Peoples, which was created to campaign for economic, social and civil rights in Britain and beyond. The organisation's work was credited with laying the groundwork for the Race Relations Act of 1965, the first piece of legislation to outlaw discrimination ‘on the grounds of colour, race or ethnic or national origins.’

King and Moody were notable for their political achievements, but they were just two of many thousands of people whose contributions have been overlooked. “If politicians had been better informed about these subjects, maybe the situation would not have deteriorated as it has,” says Bourne.

Sam King’s granddaughter Dione McDonald says the focus should now be on education. “This is a part of history that you are not allowing the next generation to understand. All children need to understand why their city and country is the way it is. Ignorance is not fun, and it’s unfair if people are not given the option to deal with it. You deny people an understanding. We still have a long way to go.”

Just as the Windrush Foundation is campaigning to improve education around stories of migration, McDonald says the topic should not be optional for schools.

“The next generation are part of a global world, not a local one, and if you are going to talk about the topic you might as well talk about it properly. If you want a society that’s united and has a sense of community and responsibility you need to give them the information to begin to be accepting.”

Britain has lost heroes from its own story - by forgetting these people, we are erasing the bravery and civil rights work that helped to make the country what it is. It required an unusual dignity and drive to achieve so much in a country that ignored such contribution; throughout their lives, these veterans showed both.

[blackkudos]

Langston Hughes

James Mercer Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri.

He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry. Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance in New York City. He famously wrote about the period that "the negro was in vogue", which was later paraphrased as "when Harlem was in vogue".

Biography

Ancestry and childhood

Like many African Americans, Hughes has complex ancestry. Both of Hughes' paternal great-grandmothers were enslaved African Americans and both of his paternal great-grandfathers were white slave owners in Kentucky. According to Hughes, one of these men was Sam Clay, a Scottish-American whiskey distiller of Henry County and supposedly a relative of the statesman Henry Clay. The other was Silas Cushenberry, a Jewish-American slave trader of Clark County. Hughes's maternal grandmother Mary Patterson was of African-American, French, English and Native American descent. One of the first women to attend Oberlin College, she married Lewis Sheridan Leary, also of mixed race, before her studies. Leary subsequently joined John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 and died from his wounds.

In 1869 the widow Mary Patterson Leary married again, into the elite, politically active Langston family. (See The Talented Tenth.) Her second husband was Charles Henry Langston, of African-American, Euro-American and Native American ancestry. He and his younger brother John Mercer Langston worked for the abolitionist cause and helped lead the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society in 1858. Charles Langston later moved to Kansas, where he was active as an educator and activist for voting and rights for African Americans. Charles and Mary's daughter Caroline was the mother of Langston Hughes.

Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, the second child of school teacher Carrie (Caroline) Mercer Langston and James Nathaniel Hughes (1871–1934). Langston Hughes grew up in a series of Midwestern small towns. Hughes' father left his family and later divorced Carrie. He traveled to Cuba and then Mexico, seeking to escape the enduring racism in the United States.

After his parents separated, his mother traveled seeking employment, and young Langston Hughes was raised mainly in Lawrence, Kansas by his maternal grandmother, Mary Patterson Langston. Through the black American oral tradition and drawing from the activist experiences of her generation, Mary Langston instilled in her grandson a lasting sense of racial pride. He spent most of his childhood in Lawrence. In his 1940 autobiography The Big Sea he wrote: "I was unhappy for a long time, and very lonesome, living with my grandmother. Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books — where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas."

After the death of his grandmother, Hughes went to live with family friends, James and Mary Reed, for two years. Later, Hughes lived again with his mother Carrie in Lincoln, Illinois. She had remarried when he was still an adolescent, and eventually they moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where he attended high school.

His writing experiments began when he was young. While in grammar school in Lincoln, Hughes was elected class poet. He stated that in retrospect he thought it was because of the stereotype about African Americans having rhythm.

I was a victim of a stereotype. There were only two of us Negro kids in the whole class and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry. Well, everyone knows, except us, that all Negroes have rhythm, so they elected me as class poet.

During high school in Cleveland, Hughes wrote for the school newspaper, edited the yearbook, and began to write his first short stories, poetry, and dramatic plays. His first piece of jazz poetry, "When Sue Wears Red," was written while he was in high school.

Relationship with father

Hughes had a very poor relationship with his father, with whom he lived in Mexico for a brief period in 1919. Upon graduating from high school in June 1920, Hughes returned to Mexico to live with his father, hoping to convince him to support his plan to attend Columbia University. Hughes later said that, prior to arriving in Mexico, "I had been thinking about my father and his strange dislike of his own people. I didn't understand it, because I was a Negro, and I liked Negroes very much." Initially, his father had hoped for Hughes to attend a university abroad, and to study for a career in engineering. On these grounds, he was willing to provide financial assistance to his son but did not support his desire to be a writer. Eventually, Hughes and his father came to a compromise: Hughes would study engineering, so long as he could attend Columbia. His tuition provided; Hughes left his father after more than a year. While at Columbia in 1921, Hughes managed to maintain a B+ grade average. He left in 1922 because of racial prejudice. He was attracted more to the people and the neighborhood of Harlem than his studies, though he continued writing poetry.

Adulthood

Hughes worked at various odd jobs, before serving a brief tenure as a crewman aboard the S.S. Malone in 1923, spending six months traveling to West Africa and Europe. In Europe, Hughes left the S.S. Malone for a temporary stay in Paris. There he met and had a romance with Anne Marie Coussey, a British-educated African from a well-to-do Gold Coast family; they subsequently corresponded but she eventually married Hugh Wooding, a promising Trinidadian lawyer.(Wooding went on to become chancellor of the University of the West Indies; a law school in Trinidad and Tobago was named in his honor.)

During his time in England in the early 1920s, Hughes became part of the black expatriate community. In November 1924, he returned to the U.S. to live with his mother in Washington, D.C. After assorted odd jobs, he gained white-collar employment in 1925 as a personal assistant to the historian Carter G. Woodson at the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. As the work demands limited his time for writing, Hughes quit the position to work as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel. There he encountered the poet Vachel Lindsay, with whom he shared some poems. Impressed with the poems, Lindsay publicized his discovery of a new black poet. By this time, Hughes's earlier work had been published in magazines and was about to be collected into his first book of poetry.

The following year, Hughes enrolled in Lincoln University, a historically black university in Chester County, Pennsylvania. He joined the Omega Psi Phi fraternity. Thurgood Marshall, who later became an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, was a classmate of Hughes during his undergraduate studies.

After Hughes earned a B.A. degree from Lincoln University in 1929, he returned to New York. Except for travels to the Soviet Union and parts of the Caribbean, he lived in Harlem as his primary home for the remainder of his life. During the 1930s, he became a resident of Westfield, New Jersey.

Sexuality

Some academics and biographers believe that Hughes was homosexual and included homosexual codes in many of his poems, as did Walt Whitman, whom Hughes cited as an influence on his poetry. Hughes's story "Blessed Assurance" deals with a father's anger over his son's effeminacy and "queerness". The biographer Aldrich argues that, in order to retain the respect and support of black churches and organizations and avoid exacerbating his precarious financial situation, Hughes remained closeted.

Arnold Rampersad, the primary biographer of Hughes, determined that Hughes exhibited a preference for other African-American men in his work and life. But, in his biography Rampersad denies Hughes's homosexuality, and concludes that Hughes was probably asexual and passive in his sexual relationships. Hughes did, however, show a respect and love for his fellow black man (and woman). Other scholars argue for his homosexuality: his love of black men is evidenced in a number of reported unpublished poems to an alleged black male lover.

Death

On May 22, 1967, Hughes died in New York City at the age of 65 from complications after abdominal surgery related to prostate cancer. His ashes are interred beneath a floor medallion in the middle of the foyer in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. It is the entrance to an auditorium named for him. The design on the floor is an African cosmogram entitled Rivers. The title is taken from his poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers". Within the center of the cosmogram is the line: "My soul has grown deep like the rivers".

Career

First published in 1921 in The Crisis — official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) — "The Negro Speaks of Rivers", which became Hughes's signature poem, was collected in his first book of poetry The Weary Blues (1926). Hughes's first and last published poems appeared in The Crisis; more of his poems were published in The Crisis than in any other journal. Hughes' life and work were enormously influential during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, alongside those of his contemporaries, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Aaron Douglas. Except for McKay, they worked together also to create the short-lived magazine Fire!! Devoted to Younger Negro Artists.

Hughes and his contemporaries had different goals and aspirations than the black middle class. Hughes and his fellows tried to depict the "low-life" in their art, that is, the real lives of blacks in the lower social-economic strata. They criticized the divisions and prejudices within the black community based on skin color. Hughes wrote what would be considered their manifesto, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain", published in The Nation in 1926:

"The younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too. The tom-tom cries, and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain free within ourselves."

His poetry and fiction portrayed the lives of the working-class blacks in America, lives he portrayed as full of struggle, joy, laughter, and music. Permeating his work is pride in the African-American identity and its diverse culture. "My seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind," Hughes is quoted as saying. He confronted racial stereotypes, protested social conditions, and expanded African America’s image of itself; a "people's poet" who sought to reeducate both audience and artist by lifting the theory of the black aesthetic into reality.

Hughes stressed a racial consciousness and cultural nationalism devoid of self-hate. His thought united people of African descent and Africa across the globe to encourage pride in their diverse black folk culture and black aesthetic. Hughes was one of the few prominent black writers to champion racial consciousness as a source of inspiration for black artists. His African-American race consciousness and cultural nationalism would influence many foreign black writers, including Jacques Roumain, Nicolás Guillén, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Aimé Césaire. Along with the works of Senghor, Césaire, and other French-speaking writers of Africa and of African descent from the Caribbean, such as René Maran from Martinique and Léon Damas from French Guiana in South America, the works of Hughes helped to inspire the Négritude movement in France. A radical black self-examination was emphasized in the face of European colonialism. In addition to his example in social attitudes, Hughes had an important technical influence by his emphasis on folk and jazz rhythms as the basis of his poetry of racial pride.

In 1930, his first novel, Not Without Laughter, won the Harmon Gold Medal for literature. At a time before widespread arts grants, Hughes gained the support of private patrons and he was supported for two years prior to publishing this novel. The protagonist of the story is a boy named Sandy, whose family must deal with a variety of struggles due to their race and class, in addition to relating to one another.

In 1931, Hughes helped form the "New York Suitcase Theater" with playwright Paul Peters, artist Jacob Burck, and writer (soon-to-be underground spy) Whittaker Chambers, an acquaintance from Columbia. In 1932, he was part of a board to produce a Soviet film on "Negro Life" with Malcolm Cowley, Floyd Dell, and Chambers.

In 1932, Hughes and Ellen Winter wrote a pageant to Caroline Decker in an attempt to celebrate her work with the striking coal miners of the Harlan County War, but it was never performed. It was judged to be a "long, artificial propaganda vehicle too complicated and too cumbersome to be performed."

Maxim Lieber became his literary agent, 1933–45 and 1949–50. (Chambers and Lieber worked in the underground together around 1934–35.)

Hughes' first collection of short stories was published in 1934 with The Ways of White Folks. He finished the book at a Carmel, California cottage provided for a year by Noel Sullivan, another patron. These stories are a series of vignettes revealing the humorous and tragic interactions between whites and blacks. Overall, they are marked by a general pessimism about race relations, as well as a sardonic realism. He also became an advisory board member to the (then) newly formed San Francisco Workers' School (later the California Labor School).

In 1935 Hughes received a Guggenheim Fellowship. The same year that Hughes established his theatre troupe in Los Angeles, he realized an ambition related to films by co-writing the screenplay for Way Down South. Hughes believed his failure to gain more work in the lucrative movie trade was due to racial discrimination within the industry.

In Chicago, Hughes founded The Skyloft Players in 1941, which sought to nurture black playwrights and offer theatre "from the black perspective." Soon thereafter, he was hired to write a column for the Chicago Defender, in which he presented some of his "most powerful and relevant work", giving voice to black people. The column ran for twenty years. In 1943, Hughes began publishing stories about a character he called Jesse B. Semple, often referred to and spelled "Simple", the everyday black man in Harlem who offered musings on topical issues of the day. Although Hughes seldom responded to requests to teach at colleges, in 1947 he taught at Atlanta University. In 1949, he spent three months at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools as a visiting lecturer. Between 1942 and 1949 Hughes was a frequent writer and served on the editorial board of Common Ground, a literary magazine focused on cultural pluralism in the United States published by the Common Council for American Unity (CCAU).

He wrote novels, short stories, plays, poetry, operas, essays, and works for children. With the encouragement of his best friend and writer, Arna Bontemps, and patron and friend, Carl Van Vechten, he wrote two volumes of autobiography, The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander, as well as translating several works of literature into English.

From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, Hughes' popularity among the younger generation of black writers varied even as his reputation increased worldwide. With the gradual advancement toward racial integration, many black writers considered his writings of black pride and its corresponding subject matter out of date. They considered him a racial chauvinist. He found some new writers, among them James Baldwin, lacking in such pride, over-intellectual in their work, and occasionally vulgar.

Hughes wanted young black writers to be objective about their race, but not to scorn it or flee it. He understood the main points of the Black Power movement of the 1960s, but believed that some of the younger black writers who supported it were too angry in their work. Hughes's work Panther and the Lash, posthumously published in 1967, was intended to show solidarity with these writers, but with more skill and devoid of the most virulent anger and racial chauvinism some showed toward whites. Hughes continued to have admirers among the larger younger generation of black writers. He often helped writers by offering advice and introducing them to other influential persons in the literature and publishing communities. This latter group, including Alice Walker, whom Hughes discovered, looked upon Hughes as a hero and an example to be emulated within their own work. One of these young black writers (Loften Mitchell) observed of Hughes:

"Langston set a tone, a standard of brotherhood and friendship and cooperation, for all of us to follow. You never got from him, 'I am the Negro writer,' but only 'I am a Negro writer.' He never stopped thinking about the rest of us."

Political views

Hughes, like many black writers and artists of his time, was drawn to the promise of Communism as an alternative to a segregated America. Many of his lesser-known political writings have been collected in two volumes published by the University of Missouri Press and reflect his attraction to Communism. An example is the poem "A New Song".

In 1932, Hughes became part of a group of black people who went to the Soviet Union to make a film depicting the plight of African Americans in the United States. The film was never made, but Hughes was given the opportunity to travel extensively through the Soviet Union and to the Soviet-controlled regions in Central Asia, the latter parts usually closed to Westerners. While there, he met Robert Robinson, an African American living in Moscow and unable to leave. In Turkmenistan, Hughes met and befriended the Hungarian author Arthur Koestler, then a Communist who was given permission to travel there.

As later noted in Koestler's autobiography, Hughes, together with some forty other Black Americans, had originally been invited to the Soviet Union to produce a Soviet film on "Negro Life", but the Soviets dropped the film idea because of their 1933 success in getting the US to recognize the Soviet Union and establish an embassy in Moscow. This entailed a toning down of Soviet propaganda on racial segregation in America. Hughes and his fellow Blacks were not informed of the reasons for the cancelling, but he and Koestler worked it out for themselves.

Hughes also managed to travel to China and Japan before returning to the States.

Hughes's poetry was frequently published in the CPUSA newspaper and he was involved in initiatives supported by Communist organizations, such as the drive to free the Scottsboro Boys. Partly as a show of support for the Republican faction during the Spanish Civil War, in 1937 Hughes traveled to Spain as a correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American and other various African-American newspapers. Hughes was also involved in other Communist-led organizations such as the John Reed Clubs and the League of Struggle for Negro Rights. He was more of a sympathizer than an active participant. He signed a 1938 statement supporting Joseph Stalin's purges and joined the American Peace Mobilization in 1940 working to keep the U.S. from participating in World War II.

Hughes initially did not favor black American involvement in the war because of the persistence of discriminatory U.S. Jim Crow laws and racial segregation and disfranchisement throughout the South. He came to support the war effort and black American participation after deciding that war service would aid their struggle for civil rights at home. The scholar Anthony Pinn has noted that Hughes, together with Lorraine Hansberry and Richard Wright, was a humanist "critical of belief in God. They provided a foundation for nontheistic participation in social struggle." Pinn has found that such writers are sometimes ignored in the narrative of American history that chiefly credits the civil rights movement to the work of affiliated Christian people.

Hughes was accused of being a Communist by many on the political right, but he always denied it. When asked why he never joined the Communist Party, he wrote, "it was based on strict discipline and the acceptance of directives that I, as a writer, did not wish to accept." In 1953, he was called before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations led by Senator Joseph McCarthy. He stated, "I never read the theoretical books of socialism or communism or the Democratic or Republican parties for that matter, and so my interest in whatever may be considered political has been non-theoretical, non-sectarian, and largely emotional and born out of my own need to find some way of thinking about this whole problem of myself." Following his testimony, Hughes distanced himself from Communism. He was rebuked by some on the Radical Left who had previously supported him. He moved away from overtly political poems and towards more lyric subjects. When selecting his poetry for his Selected Poems (1959) he excluded all his radical socialist verse from the 1930s.

Representation in other media

Hughes was featured reciting his poetry on the album Weary Blues (MGM, 1959), with music by Charles Mingus and Leonard Feather, and he also contributed lyrics to Randy Weston's Uhuru Afrika (Roulette, 1960).

Hughes' life has been portrayed in film and stage productions since the late 20th century. In Looking for Langston (1989), British filmmaker Isaac Julien claimed him as a black gay icon — Julien thought that Hughes' sexuality had historically been ignored or downplayed. Film portrayals of Hughes include Gary LeRoi Gray's role as a teenage Hughes in the short subject film Salvation (2003) (based on a portion of his autobiography The Big Sea), and Daniel Sunjata as Hughes in the Brother to Brother (2004). Hughes' Dream Harlem, a documentary by Jamal Joseph, examines Hughes' works and environment.

Paper Armor (1999) by Eisa Davis and Hannibal of the Alps (2005) by Michael Dinwiddie are plays by African-American playwrights that address Hughes's sexuality. Spike Lee's 1996 film Get on the Bus, included a black gay character, played by Isaiah Washington, who invokes the name of Hughes and punches a homophobic character, saying, "This is for James Baldwin and Langston Hughes."

Hughes was also featured prominently in a national campaign sponsored by the Center for Inquiry (CFI) known as African Americans for Humanism.

Hughes' Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz, written in 1960, was performed for the first time in March 2009 with specially composed music by Laura Karpman at Carnegie Hall, at the Honor festival curated by Jessye Norman in celebration of the African-American cultural legacy. Ask Your Mama is the centerpiece of "The Langston Hughes Project", a multimedia concert performance directed by Ron McCurdy, professor of music in the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California. The European premiere of The Langston Hughes Project, featuring Ice-T and McCurdy, took place at the Barbican Centre, London, on November 21, 2015, as part of the London Jazz Festival.

On September 22, 2016, his poem "I, Too" was printed on a full page of the New York Times in response to the riots of the previous day in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Literary archives

The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University holds the Langston Hughes papers (1862–1980) and the Langston Hughes collection (1924–1969) containing letters, manuscripts, personal items, photographs, clippings, artworks, and objects that document the life of Hughes. The Langston Hughes Memorial Library on the campus of Lincoln University, as well as at the James Weldon Johnson Collection within the Yale University also hold archives of Hughes' work.

Honors and awards

1926: Hughes won the Witter Bynner Undergraduate Poetry Prize.

1935: Hughes was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed him to travel to Spain and Russia.

1941: Hughes was awarded a fellowship from the Rosenwald Fund.

1943: Lincoln University awarded Hughes an honorary Litt.D.

1954: Hughes won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.

1960: the NAACP awarded Hughes the Spingarn Medal for distinguished achievements by an African American.

1961: National Institute of Arts and Letters.

1963: Howard University awarded Hughes an honorary doctorate.

1964: Western Reserve University awarded Hughes an honorary Litt.D.

1973: the first Langston Hughes Medal was awarded by the City College of New York.

1979: Langston Hughes Middle School was created in Reston, Virginia.

1981: New York City Landmark status was given to the Harlem home of Langston Hughes at 20 East 127th Street (40°48′26.32″N 73°56′25.54″W) by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission and 127th Street was renamed "Langston Hughes Place". The Langston Hughes House was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

2002: The United States Postal Service added the image of Langston Hughes to its Black Heritage series of postage stamps.

2002: scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Langston Hughes on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.

2009: Langston Hughes High School was created in Fairburn, Georgia.

2015: Google Doodle commemorated his 113th birthday.

Wikipedia

[back-and-totheleft]

Gonzo the great

On a cold winter’s day in 1984, exiled by Hollywood and with his career seemingly kaput, Oliver Stone bought a cooked lamb and offered it up with fire, incense, and prayer in a ritual sacrifice on his front lawn, begging forgiveness from Pallas Athena, goddess of wisdom. “It was a strange and solitary ceremony, witnessed only by my two ravenous dogs,” Stone explains, adding that he let his hungry pets chow down when he was done. “After all, what did the Greeks do with all those fine oxen and sheep that were sacrificed on Homer’s pyres?”

That an Oscar-winning screenwriter might attempt to fix a career slump by freaking out his neighbors with a ritual sacrifice of store-bought lamb is the kind of colorful anecdote you could hear about any Hollywood flake. But the intense sincerity of the ceremony––the 100% irony-free belief that Pallas Athena would indeed be listening––well, that could only come from Oliver Stone, a larger-than-life character who sees himself as a figure of modern myth. He’s often ridiculous but not entirely wrong. Stone’s compulsively readable new memoir CHASING THE LIGHT chronicles the first half of his career with the kind of grand, go-for-broke immediacy that defined his early films. I couldn’t put it down.

It’s a life of such bold gestures the book could rightfully be written in all caps. Born to a wealthy stockbroker and his French war bride, William Oliver Stone dropped out of Yale to write the Great American Novel at the age of nineteen. When it was rejected by publishers, he hurled the manuscript into the East River and enlisted in the Army, requesting assignment to the Infantry to prove his mettle on the battlefield. Stone later shaped his wartime experiences into “Platoon,” the 1986 release of which to rapturous acclaim, boffo box office, and four Academy Awards serves as the ending of this book, the catharsis at the end of a long and tortured path home from Vietnam.

After returning from the war, Stone almost immediately landed in a Mexican jail for smuggling drugs, rescued only by his father’s connections while the rest around him were left to rot. He finally found his calling at NYU’s film school, where a fast-talking young instructor named Martin Scorsese greatly admired his student short, announcing to the class “This is a filmmaker, ”a benediction Stone still describes as “my diploma.” (The twitchy, anti-social vet was at the time driving a cab at night, inadvertently supplying some inspiration for his professor’s most iconic screen character.)

Most of “Chasing the Light” is devoted to Oliver’s early misadventures in Hollywood, rocketing to stardom at the age of 33 with his Oscar-winning screenplay for “Midnight Express,” then burning all his bridges on a quick trip back to relative obscurity. It’s a dishy, delicious read, telling tales out of school and at the expense of directors who had the temerity to change a word of the brilliant screenplays he’d provided them with. If ever there was a writer who needed to direct his own material, it’s Oliver Stone.

(In the great 2015 documentary “De Palma,” the “Scarface” director says he had to ban Stone from the set because he was overstepping his bounds by giving the actors line readings. Stone here diplomatically describes De Palma as “simply not the most energetic of human beings.” Sounds like it was a fun production.)

Curiously enough, one comes away with a sense that the character closest to Stone’s heart was Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian, whose adventures the screenwriter originally envisioned as a ten or twelve (!) film series. He includes generous excerpts from his original, admittedly un-filmable 140-page script, full of pig mutants, hydra heads, and gloriously purple prose. It’s no stretch to say that Stone sees much of himself in the lusty, literate pagan warrior, and this outsized self-image––which does much to explain his off-putting affinity for despots like Castro and Putin––is backed up in the book by grandiose allusions and constant quotations from Homer, Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” and of course, Jim Morrison. So much Morrison.

Stone’s career resurrection would arrive with the 1986 double-whammy of “Salvador” and “Platoon,” both backed by Hemdale’s John Daly, a beloved indie film buccaneer to whom “Chasing The Light” is dedicated. It’s with these pictures that Stone took the helm and perfected his blunt-force trauma, American tabloid-style of storytelling. Pauline Kael said “he writes and directs as if someone had put a gun to the back of his neck and yelled ‘Go!’ and didn’t take it away until he’d finished,” which is an apt description of the low-budget, guerrilla filmmaking productions chronicled herein. Stone rollickingly recounts the logistical nightmares overcome during these grueling location shoots, in the process finding at least a dozen different ways call his “Salvador” star James Woods a giant pussy.

In a candid autopsy of what went wrong with his screenplay for “Year of the Dragon,” Stone speculates that director Michael Cimino never fully recovered from the disastrous experience of “Heaven’s Gate,” insinuating that he understands this all too well. Likewise, I don’t feel like Stone ever really bounced back from the debacle of his 2004 “Alexander,” an obviously flawed yet deeply impassioned and fascinating picture that only Oliver Stone could have made. He’s directed some good films since then, but they’ve been uncharacteristically timid and visually tame, missing that edge of mania––the fire-in-the-belly so beautifully conjured by this memoir. Maybe it’s time for him to call again upon Pallas Athena, or was the writing of this book the real ritual?

-Sean Burns’ review of Oliver Stone’s Chasing the Light, North Shore Movies, Aug 16 2020 [x]

[pixelgrotto]

I believe in video game stories  I quite like experiencing a story through the format of a video game. I’d even go so far as to say that aside from reading, it’s probably my preferred method of digesting a narrative. (I’m not as big on TV or movies - shocking, I know!) I think a lot of this appreciation comes from the fact that as a long term PC gamer, I was exposed to many point ‘n click adventures at a young age. These were games that fancied themselves as controllable books, with “author” names frequently placed front and center on the box art. The Secret of Monkey Island was specifically a Ron Gilbert game, King’s Quest VI a Roberta Williams jam. And boy, did growing up with these games give me an appreciation for the excitement that interactive storytelling could generate. After my six-year-old self had successfully guided Alexander of Daventry through the catacombs on the Isle of the Sacred Mountain and defeated the minotaur keeping Lady Celeste hostage, I was a fan for life. (Note: Clicking that link and watching the whole scene might induce eye-rolling, since it seems dated in this day and age, but trust me, King’s Quest VI is still an awesome game.)  But not everyone had the same experiences as I did growing up. For a prominent segment of the population, story in games doesn’t really matter, and it never did. In fact, it seems that every other month on NeoGAF, a new thread will pop up on video game stories, and inevitably it’ll spark a debate where a whole mess of posters echo things like “90% of all game stories suck” or “story in games doesn’t matter to me because if I want story I’ll watch a movie or read a book.” Then there are hot takes on the pitfalls of game storytelling by Twitter personalities and academics that occasionally appear in mainstream outlets like The Atlantic. Case in point - one that started a controversy last month with its clickbaity headline “Video Games Are Better Without Stories.”  I rolled my eyes when I read The Atlantic article, mostly because it’s written by an academic who’s previously written stuff in a similar vein that I didn’t agree with, like “Video Games Are Better Without Characters.” The internet arguments that emerged surrounding his newest piece made me pay a little more attention this time, though. In a nutshell, Ian Bogost’s thesis is that the systems within a game should come first, and the ability of players to manipulate these systems to manufacture their own narratives is where the medium’s true strength lies. In other words, emergent gameplay trumps traditional storytelling.

This isn’t necessarily a bad point. After all, some of the most prominent and popular games in this day and age either keep plot in the background or totally ignore it in favor of focusing on mechanics that give power to the players, letting them create their own stories that stick out in their head more than any pre-engineered script could. Dark Souls does this well, with unforgiving combat and an atmosphere that makes everyone playing it feel like they’re stuck in their own personal hell. The newest Zelda game, Breath of the Wild, does it too, keeping story to a relative minimum and encouraging players to experiment with Link’s items and abilities instead. And then you have competitive games like League of Legends and Overwatch, which leave their story components out of the mix completely.  But despite all of these titles not placing story as their biggest priority, it’s kinda obvious that large segments of their fandoms feel differently. Just type “Dark Souls story” into YouTube and you’re assaulted with a staggering number of videos, and the encyclopedia of fan-assembled lore on the Dark Souls Wiki page is a force to be reckoned with. Breath of the Wild has inspired spectacular discussion on where it falls in the wonderfully convoluted timeline established by Hyrule Historia. League of Legends has a whole website devoted to its lore, and Overwatch has comics and animated shorts that fans gobble up with frightening veracity, often while begging Blizzard to release some sort of campaign revealing more background behind the Omnic Crisis. If anything, this unquenchable thirst for lore shows that despite gameplay coming first when it comes to interactive entertainment, at the end of the day, human beings still love a solid story that contextualizes gameplay, and game designers who want to create big narrative-driven experiences shouldn’t cease their efforts. Emergent gameplay is great, but going by Ian Bogost’s suggestion that games should SOLELY focus on this assumes that 1) all players want the sort of system-heavy games that he prefers (SimCity, for example), and 2) that the “traditional” route of telling a story within a game can never compete with film and literature. 

I find the argument that games can never move or shake you in the same way that movies and books do to be awfully defeatist. It’s also an unfair comparison, since games are a much younger medium that face the challenge of conveying a plot around characters that can be controlled. Books and movies don’t have to deal with this, and endlessly asking questions like “where’s the Citizen Kane of video games” is both using a (frightfully overrated) yardstick from one medium to unfairly judge the efforts of another, and ignoring the unique strength that games do bring to the table - the ability to generate investment and immersion by making the player feel like he or she is an integral participant in the plot rather than a mere observer. 

The sensation of feeling like I was part of the action is what gripped me to King’s Quest VI as a child. It’s what grips me to the best story-driven games out there, the ones that realize that they have this strength and capitalize upon it. The potential that games have for immersion is unsurpassed, and while it’s true that the medium is capable of producing plenty of schlocky, C-grade plots, the same could easily be said of books or movies, especially when you consider all the young adult fiction and superhero films that pass for quality entertainment in this day and age. Those who think all video game stories are garbage are more often than not cutscene skippers who are simply too impatient to give games a chance, biased individuals who are too used to experiencing stories in more passive forms of media or quite simply people who need to play better games. Because once you start judging the medium on its own terms and take the time to do some digging, there are many fine stories to be found out there - The Witcher games (which are arguably a tad superior to the books that spawned them), Deus Ex, the Quest for Glory series, the Gabriel Knight games, the Monkey Islands, The Last Express, Planescape: Torment and even a little game from Taiwan named Detention which could have been an indie movie, but arguably was more effective in reaching a wider audience on Steam.

Games don’t necessarily need to bring narrative to the forefront, as successes like Overwatch prove. But I’m glad that certain titles and developers do seek to accomplish this goal, because there are fans out there who believe in interactive stories and want to see this medium continue conveying bigger and better tales. I’m one of them, and I won’t stop being one of them. I’m a product of Alexander of Daventry, Geralt of Rivea, Guybrush Threepwood and all the other great characters inhabiting high quality video game narratives, and their stories are going to stick with me as long as I live..no matter what opinions pretentious contrarians publish on the internet. 

Header image of Geralt with a book is from a larger wallpaper available on CD Projekt Red’s website. You can see the big version here. 

[tigerbeepress]

Indie Vs. ...Not

When news first came out that Milo YouKnowWhoPoulos had been offered a book deal with Simon & Schuster, and various conscientious S&S writers were publicly speaking out—with Roxanne Gay, remarkably, even pulling her forthcoming book from them—I kept thinking one thing: this will never happen to TigerBee’s authors. 

The thought wasn’t smug, it was simply persistent, especially after I saw Gay’s poignant “please don’t let it be my publisher” tweet. We can’t offer our authors $250k book deals (yet—maybe in 2018, ha) but we can offer them the peace of mind that their work will be in a catalog permanently free from fascists, neo-Nazis, professional racists, career Islamphobes, etc. While that’s among the faintest praise possible, it’s also, sadly, not a guarantee many mainstream publishers can make.* We’re a small press without a huge budget; we will take whatever marks of distinction we can get.

Then in February, with this confidence/pride still relatively fresh, I was at a party where a poet mentioned to me she regretted publishing her first book with a brand new press because it didn’t get much distribution, and I immediately felt bad. What if the authors we work with feel that one someday, or feel that way now? That would make me so sad. I want our authors to feel served by us; on the semi-rare occasions I try to sell someone on working with us, my solicitation always involves a lot of let me help you. (Use TB as a resource! Tell us what you need! I am your collaborator and cheerleader! I am here for you!) Because that’s how I really feel. And I believe we do the best we can to fulfill that explicit and implicit promise.

With these two ideas in mind, I started thinking of a really basic pro/con list when it comes to trusting an indie press with your writing (or your visual art, or both) as compared to taking it to a mainstream press, and here’s what I came up with. You should know, if you don’t already, that we are still new to publishing, so while I’m sharing everything I can think of, I’m sure there’s more. And if you notice something I’ve overlooked, tell me! Tweet at us, reply to this post, send an email, a Facebook message, whatever. We would love to hear. 

MAINSTREAM PUBLISHERS:

have cache, like pledging with a certain sorority/fraternity. People who pay attention to these things are going to have an informed reaction to your book landing at FSG or Little Brown or Simon & Schuster. They’re going to presume things about the work (and you) without having read the book, possibly before the book even exists, like how literary it is, how sellable it is, etc. They’re going to be impressed, or they’re going to be snide, or they’ll just be happy for you. Likewise, the acquisition might make you feel extra good, or you might feel disappointed. You might feel insecure because it’s not as elite an association as you wanted, or you might feel good and insecure, as in: holy shit I can’t believe this publisher wanted me, now I have to make sure the book is really good and a bestseller and gets no bad reviews, etc. Or so I’ve heard + seen from my friends. I’m pretty much clueless when it comes to the reputation of imprints, like which one is supposed to be for respected esoteric geniuses who never make money, and which is known for pop psychology/science titles, and so on. It’s all a big question mark to me. But to plenty of other people, it’s important, or at least relevant. Of course, to even more people, it’s not. 

have money, some of which they might give to you. At the risk of stating the obvious, even very large and very rich publishers buy books for tiny sums. But I find it nearly inconceivable that an indie press has ever given a six figure advance or even a high five figure one. (Though I could be wrong, and if you know of some exceptions, please tell me who/when/what book!) If you have your heart set on a massive advance, you’ll probably find it hard to get excited about any small publisher. Because $$$$$$$. I get it. 

have excellent distribution. I am in awe of the seamless, colossal endeavor that is book distribution for mainstream publishers. It’s like magic to me, and there’s so much more I could say about it but it would probably bore you so I’m just going to leave it at: if someone wants to order your book from a Barnes & Noble branch and you’re with a large publisher, B&N can probably do that with no problem. Of course, it’s baffling to me that someone would order a book from a big box bookstore instead of requesting it from an indie bookstore or just using Amazon, but I digress. 

(They'll take care of foreign distribution, too, probably.) This is, like, something we cannot even begin to think about right now. Though we do fulfill lots of international orders on our website.

have ~connections~. Big publishing houses are well-positioned to get you press in the form of TV interviews, book reviews, readings, etc, though—and more on this in a minute—it’s not a guarantee they’ll use their resources wisely, or at all. 

I think those are the highlights. Now for the home team:

SMALL/INDIE PRESSES:

give a shit. How can they not? They’re definitely not in it for the money, which does not exist, or the glory (because, ditto.) They’re doing it because they really love poetry/experimental fiction/brilliant nonfiction/etc. and want the world to have more of it. I’m not implying people in mainstream publishing don’t feel the same way, because I know some do. But obviously the “culture” is different, and the intimacy is different, the familiarity and sense of investment is different, because with a small press, you’re dealing with a much smaller group of people and it’s hard to evade responsibility if you’re one of ten, one of five, or one of two people who constitute the whole enterprise. In that vein, an indie publisher....

can (probably) give you more time and attention. A big publishing house takes on a lot of projects and runs them through a lot of people. This is great when it comes to say, copyediting (aka the bane of my entire existence from now until eternity, my god I hate it so much,) but not so good when it comes to, say, promotion, when you’re trying to have a conversation with people about how your book should be sold and those people probably haven’t even read your book. (That’s a link to one of my all-time favorite essays, “Into The Woods” by Emily Gould, and if you have even a little bit of interest in writing as a career, you should read the whole thing more than once, more than twice, even, although you may stop short of reading it the 20 times that I likely have.)  

have less reach but more close connections. Over the past two years, between dropping off copies of Prostitute Laundry and arranging Bad Advice readings, I’ve gotten to know staff members at so many independent bookstores, and—shockingly—that includes bookstores outside of New York. It’s been a great pleasure because not only are these people fun to know in their own rights, but it also fosters a sense of community and keeps me from feeling like I’m sending emails and books into an uncaring void. As a result of those connections, I suspect, not only have the booksellers agreed to stock future TigerBee titles in the first place, but they often give those titles prominent placement, which makes a huge difference for in-store sales. (I say I suspect because who knows, maybe me always showing my face around these places exhausts the folks who work there, but the TigerBee books are just that good that they have to be kept on display tables and end caps.)  

by which I mean: Friends who’ve published with mainstream presses have told me (what I receive as) horror stories about them not being encouraged to do readings or a proper tour, having their book(s) routinely shelved in the wrong sections, billed as something they’re not, and otherwise mismanaged. Everyone makes mistakes, and it’s not as if everyone at an indie press is guaranteed to be spectacular at their job, but I’d guess most of them at least understand the importance of clear and accurate presentation and communication, especially in brick and mortar spaces.

have some cache, too. An indie publisher is still a publisher, and so it sounds better and is more legitimizing to go with a small press than to have no titles to your name, or to be self-published. (Obviously I didn’t really care about the taint of self-publishing, and I don’t think you need to either, or that anyone does, but there’s no denying it, it *is* nice to feel legitimized.) There’s also something impossibly alluring about a limited edition book that feels sort of secret. Who wouldn’t want bragging rights that they’ve got a first edition or the only edition of a chapbook by someone who goes on to be widely recognized as the genius they always were? It’s badass when you (meaning, I,) click on the first book by someone who’s a bigger deal now than they were then, and see that it’s sold out. It’s so maddening! I want that book! But everyone involved seems about 10 points cooler than they did when I thought the book was still available.** 

let you own your masters. I can’t speak for other small publishers, but our contracts are extremely generous to authors while remaining fair to us (i.e., giving us a chance to recoup some of the costs associated with the project.) We have exclusive rights for a period but then it all reverts to you, which means you can put it in an anthology, resell it, make a TV show about it, whatever, and you won’t have to pay or consult us. As a writer, I find this state of affairs really exciting. I love knowing that no one is going to get the rights to turn Prostitute Laundry into a movie unless I trust them with those rights. (And not only do I alone make the decision, I alone get paid. Sweet.)

don’t require that you have an agent. If you’ve got an agent, we are happy to work with them. But we don’t require that manuscripts be sent to us by an agent, so it’s one less thing for you to worry about if you don’t already have one. (Though by all means, please, if it gets to that point: have someone knowledgable look at our contract with you before you sign.)

gives you lots of control. I hear a lot about how writers are supposed to be divas and sometimes I see it, for sure, but I see a lot more writers being really, really nervous to voice their concerns or opinions on their books’ presentation, by which I mean the title, the cover, the marketing, etc. I have friends who’ve sucked up crappy titles assigned by their mainstream publisher in the hope that they’ll feel entitled to more leeway when they’re negotiating cover designs, or vice versa, and friends who feel like they can’t tell the truth about any of it (all of which they hate.) I’ve also seen a lot of hideous covers, like inexcusably hideous, as possibilities and as final decisions—I’m sure you’ve seen them, too. (Our nation’s ugly cover crisis is a topic for another time, like when xanax is on hand.) We have great taste, so all our products will always look beautiful, but we also care very, very much about making sure our creators are happy, so we will solicit your approval again and again at various stages of the process. Perhaps even too much! 

Sooooo, I don't know—was that useful? Clarifying? I really want every creator to end up at the place that fits them the best, whether that’s us or the biggest publisher on the planet, or a tumblr, or twitter, no publisher at all. And if you’re thinking about going with a small press but we seem too small or new for you, Birds LLC and Coffeehouse are two indie publishers I admire and respect very much, and there are tons of other worthy ones. Research, think about it, talk with friends about. I hope you find the fit that’s right for you because if you put care into your work, your work deserves it. 

—Charlotte

*Lest some pedantic person come along and be like, “what about Mein Kampf, isn’t there a responsibility to keep repugnant historical texts in print so we can learn from the past, etc. etc.”: yes, I get it, duh. That’s obviously not what I’m pointing at here. I’m referring to publishing *new* repugnant works without historical significance and furthermore, I don’t see us taking on the task of printing things that are public domain and/or part of deceased fascist author’s estate anyway, so the odds of this specific scenario presenting itself to us seem low. 

**I want your book to sell and sell and sell, and be available to everyone who would benefit from reading it, and I think it’s my job as a publisher to accurately judge existing interest and further whip up an audience, so I will always strive to do that well. But still: unattainability is hot, with people and with objects. Just ask any luxury brand that lives and dies by their artificial scarcity.

[academiablogs]

The Art of Reading Indie

(Image source)

Can anyone be beautiful if someone doesn’t say to them, “I think you’re beautiful”? Can anyone be intelligent if the results of a test don’t confirm: “you’re a genius”? And more pertinent to our discussion, can any book be good if not validated by a 4 or 5 star review? Can a book without reviews at all be good in any sense of the word? Doesn’t someone need to tell us it is? Otherwise, isn’t beauty, intelligence, and artistic worth a relative term, utterly meaningless without a verifiable source?

When you browse the shelves of a bookstore or library, you implicitly know that these books have been curated for you by the experts. Not only publishers, but booksellers, sales charts, award committees, and librarians have each had their say, and personally picked through the debris of literature to offer these chosen gems: these are good and worth your time, they seem to say. So even if you take a book and decide it’s not for you, the reason isn’t that the book itself is bad, or comes from an inferior pen; it simply wasn’t your cup of tea, or what you were in the mood for. You don’t take it personally (or most of us don’t).

The same certainly isn’t true for an indie writer, whose book is usually curated by the writer’s discretion alone. Such a book has no publisher or librarian standing behind it; it merely says why not give me a chance? But there’s no guarantee that if will be well-written. It may even be ungrammatical. Chapters might break off without development. Characters might be crude caricatures, dialogue a mannequin’s attempt at small talk. The story might betray its origins as a half-baked excuse for conflict. It might outstay its welcome by the second chapter. For these reasons and many more, some readers avoid them entirely, or at least approach them with considerable skepticism. Why read indie books when there are thousands—millions!—of properly curated books waiting to be found?

Perhaps the answer lies in those very “millions.” If there are millions of curated books, each one backed by a publishing company or an agent, can every one of those millions be a unique work of art? To have a publishing industry, in fact, you not only need a standardized measure of quality, but a product. In short, you have to produce many of the same kinds of books on a predictable schedule. If every book tried something new or innovative, the industry would falter. Money would be lost. Careers would go down the drain. In point of fact, doesn’t it take someone coming from the outside—an indie, so to speak—to reinvent the wheel? (and in art, the wheel could always run a little smoother).

Indie books have the potential to be true game changers in the industry. They don’t have to follow market trends; they don’t have to play by established rules; they can mimic old forms while boldly striving for something new; and most of all, they can question common sense advice about what makes writing and stories “good”. A team of gatekeepers, from agents to editors to CEOs will all have an opinion on this and will make sure a given book conforms to these models. Not that these people are Philistines with no taste…but they do have to make money. An indie writer would love to make money, too, but he/she (probably) has another source of income. His or her entire income probably isn’t riding on the success or failure of this novel (and if it is, maybe he/she should take up a more stable profession). The freedom of being able to publish a novel without scrutiny while following your own aesthetic leads to a classic Scylla and Charybdis situation: on one side, malicious indifference and anger to your ‘new’ book, and on the other, the chance of writing something slapdash that hasn’t undergone the proper vetting/editing process to make it worth reading.

And it’s true: so many indie books probably shouldn’t have been published. The authors might not have the skills or the patience to write a good book; or they might possess these talents, but the enticement of publishing on demand tempted them to release a product too quickly, selling a glorified rough draft as a slick, $15.99 novel. Given these realities, should we, as readers, become the gatekeepers these authors avoided? Should we read them with dark brows and clicking tongue, lashing every spelling error and grammatical lapse? Should we really expect them to be the equal of traditionally published novels? And what penalty should we exact upon them when they fail to meet these expectations?

My answer to these questions are relatively simple: you have to read them differently. They’re not ‘normal’ books. Lest this sound condescending, consider that I, too, am an indie writer. And I honestly hope that readers don’t read my books like the latest bestseller (which is why I only charge the Amazon minimum for each one, 99 cents). I write books that follow many traditional hallmarks of the fantasy genre, but I’m also aware that I can re-write or re-fashion the rules on a whim. And so I do. I write the fantasy novels that Jane Austen might have written, which means (I think) that I try to look at a familiar genre from an unfamiliar perspective. I love old books, books that are two-hundred, three-hundred, even a thousand years old. But I also love where books have ended up, and what’s happening to them today. When I try to write books from both perspectives, agents and publishers tell me I’m wrong; we don’t write like that anymore, the kids won’t understand it, your writing is stiff and you use too much punctuation. In short, it’s not a product they can successfully market and curate on the shelves with their other ‘millions.’

That’s why I chose, at first reluctantly, but now by choice, to self-publish my novels. I want to mix and match, to bend and twist, to mold the fiction into a new shape that resembles (without mirroring) the books that I love. I want to take chances. And most importantly, I want to amuse myself. I don’t see a lot of joy and gusto in publishing today, largely because it’s become so safe and predictable. Indie writing doesn’t have to be safe or predictable. What they have to do is be themselves—not according to a formula, but according to the inner logic of the story itself.

Of course, that requires readers who are willing to follow along. Readers who don’t mind the occasional spelling mistake or story lapse, but who are willing to take the stories for what they are: bold experiments by lone visionaries who don’t have the backing of a major publishing house or team of editors and curators behind them. These are people pursuing a dream against all odds, and it’s a dream no one particularly wants them to follow. For that reason we need to read these books not like the next Steven King novel or the latest Neil Gaiman installment. Experience them like a strange new language, one that takes time to translate and to understand properly. And if, in the end, the story turns out to be a dud, to require more time to rebuild and reshape—what then?

That’s the unique beauty of indie writing: you can then tell the author. Communicate your concerns and misgivings to them rather than simply lobbing off another 1-star review. Don’t look at indie writing as a finished product. Rather, it allows you, the reader, to be a co-creator, an editor, a quality control expert. Chances are, the author is waiting desperately in the wings to hear something, anything, about his or her novel. And the chances are, your insights and criticisms will be like manna from heaven, reminding authors that someone is listening—someone is reading their work. A single good reader makes any writer, no matter how accomplished, a better one. So doesn’t it behoove us to read as many indie books as possible, to find the gems, and encourage these writers—good and bad—to ruthlessly pursue their art? For writing is an art first and foremost (sorry marketers!), and only artists will help us adapt it for the ideas and individuals of the 21st century.

[thecosydragon]

My latest blog post from the cosy dragon: Interview with JW Golan

An Interview with JW Golan, author of the Stormfall Chronicles

What is your favourite Dragon in literature?

I will name two favourites: very different dragons, with very different reasons for appreciating each of them.

On the one extreme was the dragon Glaurung from J.R.R. Tolkien’s the Silmarillion. Glaurung was everything that you should expect from an evil, malicious dragon of legend. He was not just a great, fire-breathing monster, but a crafty, greedy, manipulator who took delight in how much misery he could inflict on others. Glaurung was the perfect embodiment of what an malicious dragon antagonist should be.

At the opposite extreme, were Anne McCaffrey’s dragons of Pern, who were depicted as partners with humanity with individual personalities of their own. Among the dragons of Pern, Ruth stands out by virtue of his intelligence and practical sense.

Why did you choose to become an author? What drove you to devote the hours needed to produce and polish a book?

As someone who has published both non-fiction, through a traditional publishing house, and fantasy as an indie author, I can say that in both instances I wrote because I had something that needed to be said. In both examples, there was a story that needed to be told, a story which fate had chosen myself to relay. In a very real sense, I was merely the conduit for its retelling. The story was already there, struggling to get outside. My only responsibility was to relay the tale to the best of my ability.

From among your published novels, is there one that is your own personal favourite?

I have released or will soon have released the first two installments in the Stormfall Chronicles. Comparing between the first two books, my beta-readers have concurred that the second novel is the better of the two. The first novel in the series really lays the foundation for everything that follows, and is a relatively short read – 300 pages in paperback versus 497 for the second book. The second book in the series, on the other hand, is where the tale rises to become an Epic Fantasy and not merely a High Fantasy.

Everyone has a ‘first novel’, even if many of them are a rough draft relegated to the bottom and back of your desk drawer (or your external harddrive!). Have you been able to reshape yours, or have you abandoned it for good?

My first attempt at crafting a fantasy novel came when I was in high school, decades ago. There are certainly elements and characters from that era which have remained with me and which found their way into my current series of fantasy novels, the Stormfall Chronicles. Many of those characters and elements, however, have evolved and changed over the years.

One of the reappearing characters of the Stormfall Chronicles, for example, is Eirlon. In his original incarnation, Eirlon was depicted as a powerful human mage. In his current incarnation, however, I have retained the character as a sage, whose knowledge and wisdom prove invaluable, but I have downplayed his own magical capabilities and have cast him as a gnome to further de-emphasize his role. On many levels, he has been overshadowed by other characters in the story. The result, I believe, is a more nuanced portrayal and overall story development.

Over the years, what would you say has improved significantly in your writing?

The most important changes in my writing abilities and style over the years have come from changes in perspective. When you’re experimenting with writing fantasy fiction as a high school student, your writing style and area of focus will naturally be heavily influenced by the novels and sources which you have most recently read.

With time, however, comes distance. And with distance comes perspective: the ability to see the larger picture of the story and how different story-telling techniques and elements can affect the reader’s experience. You become more self-aware as a writer, which places you in a better position to combine story-telling techniques and plot elements from a wider variety of influences.

Some authors are able to pump out a novel a year and still be filled with inspiration. Is this the case for you, or do you like to let an idea percolate for a couple of years in order to get a beautiful novel?

The Stormfall Chronicles was, for me, percolating for some time. The story combines some elements that I had experimented with decades ago, and others of more recent pedigree. So while it still takes me many months to compose and polish each novel, the story-arc which connects them was really developing across a decade or more.

The second novel in the series will be released in December of 2019, for example, eleven months after the first. And I’ve already begun the first draft for the third book. I’m expecting the original characters and story-arc to span a total of four novels, with material still remaining for both a prequel, and a stand-alone sequel set decades into the future.

So I suppose that for me, the ideas need to develop for some number of months or years, before the elements are mature enough to set the stories down.

I have heard of writers that could only write in one place – then that cafe closed down and they could no longer write! Where do you find yourself writing most often, and on what medium (pen/paper or digital)?

As a parent with a full-time job, I find myself writing whenever and wherever I can. Over lunch, at the table at home, while waiting for my daughters to untack their horses at the barn, wherever I happen to be.

I usually try to get my first draft down in digital form so I can begin to edit it, but it sometimes doesn’t work that way. If I have a particular scene that’s been brewing in my mind and nagging me to write it down, I’ll sometimes just write it out with pen and paper if I don’t the laptop at the time.

For editing, however, I always prefer paper medium. I need a quiet place where I can review and mark-up the printed copy, a process which will be repeated countless times before any scene is ready for my beta-reviewers to read.

Before going on to hire an editor, most authors use beta-readers. How do you recruit your beta-readers, and choose an editor? Are you lucky enough to have loving family members who can read and comment on your novel?

My teenage daughters, and in particular my two older daughters, have been my beta-readers for the Stormfall Chronicles since the beginning. They were really the audience whom I was aiming at when I wrote, and there are elements in the books that grew out of their personal experiences or the experiences of their close friends. Their added perspective has been invaluable, pointing out areas where I needed to add explanations, or scenes, or where additional atmosphere or character development was needed.

As for editing, my first published book was non-fiction, published in hardcover through a traditional publisher. It was an historical recounting dealing with a particular chapter of the Cold War era, and was ultimately published by a university press. Producing and editing a book for that audience was an exacting process. I went through countless revisions to get the manuscript ready for submission to the copy editor – who is expected to be the final step in the editing process. The copy editor is the one who formats the manuscript for the printer. If they find the manuscript to insufficiently polished as of that stage, they are expected to reject the text – not edit it for the author.

From that experience, I came away with an appreciation for how much editing and review was needed to prepare a manuscript for publication. I knew that if I could polish a scholarly manuscript until it was up to a university’s publishing standards, then doing the same for a fantasy novel should prove easily within my reach.

I walk past bookshops and am drawn in by the smell of the books – ebooks simply don’t have the same attraction for me. Does this happen to you, and do you have a favourite bookshop? Or perhaps you are an e-reader fan… where do you source most of your material from?

As someone who grew up with book shops and printed books, from before the digital age, there is a certain nostalgia for the printed medium. There are a number of book shops that I have fond memories of, most of which are long gone. I’ve had to learn to adapt to the e-reader medium, and have read a number of novels in that fashion now. But for certain books there will never be a substitute for having a hardbound or paperback copy on my shelf.

I used to find myself buying books in only one genre (fantasy) before I started writing this blog. What is your favourite genre, and have your tastes changed over time?

If I’m reading purely for entertainment, then I have an appreciation for both fantasy and science fiction – depending on what mood I am in.

I appreciate fantasy for its ability to transport us away from the everyday cares of the world we live in. That escape is a large part of I want out of fiction. I have to deal with enough real world consequences in my day job – and expect the fiction that I read to be worlds apart.

Conversely, I appreciate certain science fiction works, for their ability to comment on the world in which we live – and how technology has created new challenges and questions which humanity is still struggling to face. Which is why I am less drawn to the “space opera” genre, and more drawn to stories with a message about the world in which we live or may soon be facing.

For me, both fantasy and science fiction have a place – but with very different expectations and roles.

Social media is a big thing, much to my disgust! I never have enough time myself to do what I feel is a good job. What do you do?

Most of my social media energy is focused on either my blog page, or my Facebook page – the latter of which often mirrors whatever I have most recently posted to my blog. I do have an author’s Twitter account, but I make minimal use of it in comparison. I prefer both Facebook and the blog page, because they allow me to write at more length and in greater depth on the topics at hand.

I try to post an update at least once per week. If I’m in the midst of writing the next novel, I will usually post short articles describing my progress, or my observations about the writing process or perhaps about publishing in general. I did try to take a couple of months off between when I finished the first novel and when I started on the second, to catch up on other things which I wanted to do. Things like reviewing a novel or two, reviewing whatever anime I had been watching with my daughters, or writing short stories.

Answering interview questions can often take a long time! Tell me, are you ever tempted to recycle your answers from one to the next?

Although there is probably a certain amount of overlap in some of the general questions, I have been gratified to see many new or unique questions being raised. Coming at topics from different angles helps us to keep the subject fresh and allows for perspectives which might not otherwise have been added.

About the Author

A writer, father, and aeronautical engineer, J.W. Golan lives in New England together with his wife and three daughters.

The opportunity to write fantasy stories was once a youthful dream of his – something that he first experimented with in high school. In the intervening years, however, life happened: university, jobs, marriage, and children. Although he never completely ceased writing, he also had neither the time nor excess energy to complete a full-length novel.

It was his three daughters who reintroduced him to the world of fantasy fiction. Literature was something that all of them could share, discuss and compare – together with other fantasy and literary influences. He was able to introduce some of his favorites to his daughters, and they in turn, introduced him to some of theirs.

It was this latter experience, sharing and discussing stories and literature, that convinced him to try his hand at composing fantasy novels once again: weaving together tales and ideas that had been circulating in his mind for decades. It is his hope hope that the resulting stories and characters are as fun for others to read as they were for him to write.

from https://ift.tt/2S59yg0

[thisdaynews]

The Strange, Nostalgic World of Obama-Biden Fan Fiction

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/the-strange-nostalgic-world-of-obama-biden-fan-fiction/

The Strange, Nostalgic World of Obama-Biden Fan Fiction

Those who choose to live in clinical denial, ahoy! This is a no-judgment zone, in which you will be urged to forget the current American president’s name—and instead enjoy escapist fan fiction about Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

Yes, there is such a thing. Past presidential fanfic masterworks—like “Kim Jong Elmo vs Dick Cheney and George Bush featuring Lapis Lazuli”—might have been relegated to online speakeasies, but so great is thenostalgie d’Obamathat new books about Barry and Joe are bringing fanfic’s nerdy tropes into the light of day in print.

Story Continued Below

Parodist Andrew Shaffer has just added a new entry to his enjoyably ludicrous Obama-Biden series, which launched last year withHope Never Diesand features the duo solving mysteries together. The second entry, published in July, is called, you guessed it,Hope Rides Again.Indie director Adam Reid’s gonzo graphic confection,The Adventures of Barry & Joe, which styles Obama and Biden as time-traveling superheroes, was released this past spring. It is here to, if not to save the day, then at least demonstrate the life-changing magic of putting our heads under the covers and pretending it’s 2015.

I respect you if you refuse to look back and entertain fantasies that Obama and Biden might return to deliver the Republic from evil. Biden on the 2020 stump might wield Obama’s name like a talisman to protect himself from criticism, but all sane voters know the Joe-Barack heyday is never coming back.

Still, tucking into the fantasies of Reid, a filmmaker whose 2010 filmHello Lonesomewas a festival darling, and Shaffer, a novelist who teaches writing in Kentucky, I decided to tolerate and maybe even open my heart to the authors’ poignant nostalgia for libmerica. It’s a powerful thing to mark the difference between today’s gruesome nonfan-nonfic—in which the Chosen One aims to delete China while annexing Israel and Greenland—and escape back to the relative paradise known as 2008 to 2016.

Now, to Uncle Joe.Hope Never Dies(Quirk Books), the first of the Shaffer mysteries—Hardy Boys-style with a YA version of the Dashiell Hammett narrative voice, but goofy—was released before Biden had announced his presidential bid; the second,Hope Rides Again,came out not long afterward. Like many an Obaman, Shaffer’s Biden opens the first novel frozen in time, just after the 2016 election, gorging on Ben & Jerry’s. This bothers Jill, Joe’s wife. In both Shaffer novels, Joe and Jill (and Barack and Michelle) are comparable to lovable, forgettable CBS sitcom duos of a decade ago:Everybody Loves Raymond, King of Queens.The dude is a charming galoot; the wife has his number.

But the real One True Pairing here—let’s not kid ourselves—is gonna involve Barack, whose communiqués Joe initially awaits like a schoolgirl scorned. “After Jill was sound asleep, I scrolled through old text messages Barack and I had exchanged a lifetime ago,” Shaffer writes. “It was an exercise in futility. If I kept picking at the wound, it was never going to heal.”

Biden mirrors the sulky American people. Is Barack Obama ghosting us?

Probably. But inHope Never Dies,he‘s not ghosting Biden, and after Encyclopedia Joe stumbles on the mystery of the murdered Amtrak conductor inHope Never Dies, the Dem Duo reunite to criss-cross Delaware in a farrago that leads them to find the mastermind of the opioid epidemic because why not. (It is not the Sacklers, FYI; fanfic is fic.)

On the cover ofHope Rides Again,the sequel, Obama wears tan as, in an Ethan Hunt moment, he dashingly mounts a rope ladder to a helicopter, giving a hand to trusty Joe. This choice, of course, expresses Shaffer’s fondness for no-drama Obama by reminding us that right-wing pundits had nothing to make hay about in summer 2014 but the president’s beige suit. In this novel, Joeisabout to announce his presidential bid, when Barack loses track of his BlackBerry—warning, the nostalgia goes deep; Obama even smokes again—and the device’s thief has been murdered. Off they go!

Joe encounters thugs, a grenade, near-disaster on an airplane. And he and Barack do, it’s true, end up, “huddled together, arms twisted like a couple of pretzels”—but they’re in a hole the size of a washing machine in the hull of a ship. By the time the police helicopter arrives for them, unfurling its rope ladder, they’ve finished off the bad guys and are ready to fly away, like Obama leaving the White House on January 20, 2017.Sniff.

If this is all high corn, there’s some actual sweetness, too: Shaffer clearly admires and somehow truly gets Joe’s geriatric efforts to be cool and, especially cringily,downwith the 44th president, with fist bumps and (yikes) even pseudo-Ebonics. It’s good someone finds that side of Joe charming.

Reid’sAdventures of Barry & Joe(Dey Street Books), the product of a Kickstarter campaign,is considerably skeevier than the wholesome Shaffer books. To clarify: None of this is slash. That’s a blessing. Shaffer and Reiddo not, I repeat donot, reprise (entirely) the Kirk/Spock erotics from the earliest days of pre-internet fan fiction. In case you somehow dodged the ’70s zines, in which fanfic was first codified, “slash” were the sexy fairy tales, mostly by women, in which the fellowship expressed on the USS Enterprise tilted into loving tendresse and then—sweetly, slowly—into … make-out jams.

Presumably Reid wants a bigger audience for his graphic novel than he’d get with straight slash.Adventuresis ultimately something called “ampersand” fanfic, meaning friendship, not romance, defines the Barry & Joe relationship. (That’s “ship” in fanfic-speak—you D.C. squares got a lot to learn.)

But, unaccountably, Reid still wants to see the former president and VP nekkid, so by panel No. 7 of the chapter called “True Bromance,” they’re drawn in a locker room, preparing to participate in a time-travel experiment by stripping down to their briefs. By No. 9, we’re to full-posterior nudity. Joe, so you know, has the dusty-rose busting-at-the-seams body of geezer strongman Jack LaLanne. Barry, while also shredded, is only somewhat slimmer. Glutes have been diligently attended to by the artists in that section, Joe St. Pierre (of Marvel), Anwar Hananu (Image Comics) and freelance illustrator Dezi Sienty. (The Adventures, which includes a grab bag of stories, aphorisms and short plays alongside the graphic components, is very much a group effort.)

Before Joe and Barack disappear into a time-travel vessel that looks like KitchenAid made it, Biden says, “Barack, I want you to know … I wanna hug even though we’re naked. Is that wrong?” Barry: “Let’s not.” Joe: “I’ll see you on the other side.”

Much of Reid’s scrapbook concerns madcap travel in the “multiverse,” in what could be a tribute to the lateMadmagazine.The taste level isMad,also. In one of Reid’s short stories, Joe returns to the 1970s, looks uncannily hot, and gets a chance to talk to his son, Beau, then 9. More than the nudity, this fictional resurrection of Biden’s son—the real Beau Biden died of brain cancer in 2015—seems far too intrusive to be even campily enjoyable.

I winced. Until that point, I’d been reading with the simmering notion that liberal democracy, now globally stifled, might come back to life with a new leader in 2020. But Beau Biden will not come back to life. Suddenly the whole project of these wish-fulfillment Obama fantasias seemed like nothing more than fodder for Trump ralliers to, as the T-shirt says, oil their guns with liberal tears. And how in the world could I write about it? One false move—one mentionin fictionthat Obama and Biden (in fiction) are (fictional) witnesses to an (imaginary) gangland shooting (in a work of fiction)—and you might end up quoted with a straight face in some daft anti-Biden propaganda that ricochets all over the internet. While I could suspend solemnity for a few hours, in this current breath-holdingly paranoid climate, there’s not enough oxygen for this much playfulness.

If the Library of Congress shelving system were remade for our time, these fanfic works might be classified as “WAFF,” because they’re meant to generate—you got it—warm and fuzzy feelings. Those are the feelings most Americans still vaguely remember from four years ago. But we’re forgetting. And before we introduce delusions about what might have been, we have an urgent challenge in the present—Trumpism, which can be stopped only with something other than naked cartoons. Thus, the Biden-Obama counterfactuals,especiallybecause they’re meant to be fun, leave me with CAPs—cold and pricklies. Nowthat’s a phrase from the 1970s that should be brought back.

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12 Days of Christmas — Meaning Behind the Birds

By Christine Henrichs – Understanding the 12 Days of Christmas meaning adds something special to this favorite traditional carol. Its repeating verses make it fun to learn the list of traditional gifts: A partridge in a pear tree, two turtle doves, three French hens, four calling birds, five gold rings, six geese a-laying, seven swans a-swimming, eight maids a-milking, nine ladies dancing, 10 lords a-leaping, 11 pipers piping and 12 drummers drumming, all reflect things that were familiar to life in 18th century England and France.

In a nutshell, here’s the 12 Days of Christmas meaning: In the Christian religion, the 12 Days following Christmas are the time it took for the three wise men to make their journey to the stable where the Jesus was born. January 6 is celebrated as Epiphany. Religious meanings have been imputed to each day’s gift, but there isn’t any historical documentation for that. To me, it’s interesting because it tells us about what life was like back then.

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The 12 Days of Christmas meaning is interesting to explore through a historic lens. The song lists many wild and domestic birds that brightened life in those days of political upheaval and revolution. It was first printed in the 1780 children’s book, Mirth Without Mischief, but it was already old then. It may have originated in France, as three French variations exist. The First Day’s signature partridge was introduced into England from France in the late 1770s, shortly before the carol was formalized in print and published.

The Partridge in a Pear Tree

The partridge is a colorful choice for the first gift. Partridges include lots of different species with bright plumage on their rotund bodies. The gray or English partridge, a Eurasian native, was known in England then. It came to North America around the turn of the 20th century, directly from Eurasia. It has adapted well and is now fairly common in North America. They are hardy birds, able to survive cold winter conditions in the Midwest and Canada. They aren’t much for flying, with a stocky body and short, round wings. Most flights are low, at eye level and shorter than 100 yards. They are 12 to 13 inches long with a wingspan of 21 to 22 inches and weigh about one pound.

The hens may lay as many as 22 eggs in a clutch and hatches of 16 to 18 are common. They are not usually raised as domestic birds.

Among modern chickens, the name Partridge survives today as a recognized color variety in both large fowl and bantam Cochin, Plymouth Rock, Wyandotte, Chantecler, and Silkie breeds. It is similar to the Black Red pattern, the name more appropriately applied to game birds, according to Dr. J. Batty in his Poultry Colour Guide of 1977. Males and females differ, with males have rich red plumage on their heads, backs and wings, glinting with lustrous greenish black. Females are more subdued, mostly reddish bay with distinct penciling. The Standard of Perfection details the requirements of the Partridge color pattern description.

Two Turtle Doves

Turtle Doves are a wild breed of European doves, similar to North American Mourning Doves. They would have been common in England and France during the spring, summer and fall as they migrated through to enjoy a warm winter in southern Africa. They have a long history of domestication by humans.

Doves carry a message of peace and hope, appropriate for the holiday season. Their symbolism transcends religious divisions: In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the dove was the messenger of revival to Noah on the ark in the Old Testament and the embodiment of the Holy Spirit descending on Christ at his baptism in the New Testament. In India, gods take the shape of doves. In Islam, Mohammed was attended by a spirit in the form of a dove.

In the U.S., doves and pigeons — the terms are used interchangeably, although sometimes there’s a suggestion of size, smaller birds being doves and larger ones pigeons — are very popular. Their small size puts them within reach of those who live in small homes or even apartments. Literally hundreds of colors and types of pigeons have been developed by fanciers. Stephen Green-Armytage has documented many of them in his photographs, Extraordinary Pigeons, www.abramsbooks.com. The gift of two Turtle Doves confers both the spiritual and the earthly virtues, their beauty reflecting their spiritual power.

In creating the American edition of Harrison Weir’s The Poultry Book in 1912, editors Willis Grant Johnson and George O. Brown decided to include a chapter on pigeons even though the English Weir had overlooked the species in the original. “There is an awakening of interest among fanciers for the fancy breeds, while squab-raising has become an important business in many sections,” they explain. They invited J.C. Long of New York to write the chapter, describing him as, “one of the oldest and best-known pigeon experts in the country.”

Three French Hens

Three French hens could be selected from the three old French breeds recognized by the APA for exhibition. Houdan, LaFleche and Crevecoeur were all in the original APA Standard published in 1874. They have long histories, as far as the 15th century in the case of the La Fleche, the 17th century for the others. All are large birds, topping out at 8 pounds for roosters and 7 pounds for hens. All are white egg layers.

Houdans have been known as Normandy fowl. They are a crested breed, recognized in mottled-black and solid-white varieties. Solid black, blue mottled and red mottled varieties have existed in the past and may be raised by fanciers yet.

In the U.S., Houdans were a popular dual-purpose production breed in the 19th and early 20th century. They have five toes like the Dorkings.

The La Fleche, which may be the oldest of the three, was selected and managed for egg production in Britain and North America. They take their name from the town of La Fleche, around which production was centered in the early 19th century. They probably resulted from crossing Polish, Crevecoeur and Spanish birds, which gave them their white earlobes.

Their unusual horned V-shaped comb is remarkable, in the past causing these birds to be called the Horned Fowl. Although now clean-headed, some breeders report occasional offspring with small crests or tassels. The French standard requires a crest.

Although recognized now only in black, they were bred in other colors in the past. In 1580, Prudens Choiselat wrote that blacks, reds, and fawns were the best. Blue and white strains have existed in the more recent past.

The Crevecoeur is sometimes compared to the Dorking, which has history on both English and French sides of the Channel. They also have V combs, although earlier in history they also had leaf combs. Currently recognized only in black plumage, white and blue ones were raised in the past.

The Crevecoeur was also used as a production fowl in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Left, the illustration of Partridge Wyandottes is from Dr. J. Batty’s book. Right, two of the three Houdan hens in a reproduction of Lewis Wright’s Poultry, published in 1983 by Dr. J. Batty.

Four Calling Birds

On Day Four, the “calling” birds were originally “collie” or “colley” birds, meaning black-as-coal blackbirds. My poultry mind wants to stretch and consider that they could have been black domestic fowls, such as the old French breeds, all of which were often black, or black Spanish chickens. Black turkeys also were popular in the 18th century in Europe.

Black fowl lost favor because the dark feathers show up in the skin of the bird prepared for the table, unlike white feathers. In the 19th century, white birds lost popularity because they were thought to be constitutionally weak. Fashions in food are as variable as fashions in dress.

Many breeds have modern black color varieties. American breeds such as Javas, Jersey Giants, sometimes called Black Giants, and the English Orpington have black heritage. Asian breeds such as Cochins and Langshans have a strong history of black plumage. Sumatras are always black. Black varieties of Orientals are relatively recent, such as Malays and Cubalayas. Among Mediterranean breeds, the White-Faced Black Spanish is an old breed. Minorcas were originally an entirely black breed called Red-Faced Black Spanish.

Black East Indies ducks are an old breed, although whether they date back to the 17th century is a matter of discussion. Some authorities trace their history back only as far as the 19th century. Cayuga ducks are always black. The recognition of the breed dates back to the 19th century, but it originated from wild American Black ducks crossing with domestic ducks. A black variety of Runner ducks is recent, 20th century. Black ducks could fit the description of “colley” birds.

Black turkeys were popular in Europe, and after Columbus introduced the wild turkey, American colonists crossing the Atlantic brought domesticated black varieties with them. Turkeys were often known by their origin as well, such as the Norfolk Black and the Black Spanish.

In domestic poultry, black plumage has an iridescent quality that gives it a greenish sheen, sometimes complemented with violet. The feathers are truly beautiful and eye-catching, suitable for a gift that would honor the season.

Five Gold Rings

The 12 Days of Christmas meaning behind the Day Five — Five Gold Rings — may have referred to Ring-Necked Pheasants, or perhaps to Golden Pheasants. Those original meanings unify the verses around a bird motif.

Both of them are natives of Asia but have long had successful populations in Europe and the British Isles. The Romans probably introduced them to Europe during their Empire. Pheasant were accepted residents of Britain by the 10th century.

Ring-necked pheasants were introduced to North America in the late 19th century in Oregon, where they succeeded on the second attempt, and after, were introduced in other states. They are now the state bird of South Dakota. They flourish in the wild and are one of the most hunted birds today.

Golden pheasants are successful feral residents in England, but they probably were not introduced there until later than the carol, perhaps as late as the mid-19th century. Their astonishingly beautiful plumage could certainly have inspired songs about golden birds!

They can be raised for meat or for stocking hunting ranges. A white variety eliminates the issue of dark pinfeathers on meat birds. Pheasant tail feathers are in demand for costumes and other decorations.

Six Geese A-Laying

Geese certainly were part of English and French life in the 16th century and long before. Geese have been hunted and tamed and domesticated since the early days of settled agricultural life. West of England Geese, also known as Old English geese, may well be the breed that came over with the Pilgrims on the Mayflower. They were an important American regional breed, particularly in New England.

Goose is the traditional festive bird for the holiday feast. When raising geese for meat, it’s important to note that geese do not thrive in the intense husbandry conditions of modern agriculture, so they are not as plentiful as they were in the 18th century when every farm had some. Most American cooks have never roasted one, so recipes have disappeared. Prominent chef Nigella Lawson is a champion of goose. Because they are waterfowl, they have a layer of fat under the skin. When you roast goose, it naturally bastes itself. The fat is flavorful and can be used to toast vegetables and other meats. Food critic Bonny Wolf calls goose fat “the creme de la creme of fat.”

The two main types of domestic geese are those descended from the European Grey Lag Goose and those from the Asian Swan Goose. The European line gives us the domestic Embdens, Toulouse and all their American descendants, such as Pilgrim Geese. The Asian line gives us the African and China breeds, with their distinctive knobs.

Wild geese have lived closely with humans for centuries. Even as little as a century ago, they were maintained as semi-wild livestock in England. Villagers let their geese forage and live on the River Cam. The geese spent the spring and summer on the village green, then migrated to the river for the winter.

In February, the owners would call their geese, which responded to their voices and returned home to nest and rear their young. Those offspring were a significant contribution to the villagers’ income. Those Geese A-Laying were valued not only for the eggs themselves, but for the additional birds into which the eggs would hatch.

Despite centuries of domestication, geese remain seasonal egg layers. Some modern breeds such as the China goose have been selected for laying, bringing their production of eggs up to 70 or more annually. Some breeds of ducks have become more productive egg layers with selective breeding over time.

The eggs are reputed to be superior for baking. The albumen is thicker than that of chicken eggs, making it unsuitable for whipping into meringue. The higher fat content of the yolk makes them desirable for baking. The good news about having Geese A-Laying would be that the goslings would soon follow. Geese are excellent parents and protectively raise their young.

This graphic from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources shows the differences in the heads and bills of three types of swans.

Seven Swans A-Swimming

Swans are one of the most charismatic birds. Their graceful flight and peaceful beauty as they glide across the water have inspired humans to find spiritual meaning in them. Iron Age Britons, eighth century BC and later, considered them supernatural. Mute swans are the traditional birds of folklore. Although migratory, they became semi-domesticated in Britain by the 10th century.

Richard the Lionhearted is often credited with bringing swans to England on his return from the Crusades in the 12th century, but some documentation shows swans being kept as far back as 966, during the reign of King Edgar.

It was in the 12th century that the Crown claimed ownership of all swans. In the 15th century, swan ownership was shared with the Vintners’ and Dyers’ Companies. That continues today, with an annual ceremony called Swan Upping, in which cygnets, baby swans, are captured, weighed, checked for health problems, banded and released.

So, the 12 Days of Christmas meaning behind Seven Swans-A-Swimming would have had royal as well as spiritual connotations.

In the 17th century, Mute Swans were semi-domesticated in England. In the Netherlands, they were farmed, for their down, their meat and as ornamental birds, according to Sylvia Bruce Wilmore, in her book, Swans of the World. In the Netherlands, those practices continued until after World War II. Because all swans in England belong officially to the Royal Family, swans given as gifts would have been marked on the upper part of their bills. Their markings identified the person who had responsibility for them and thus could benefit from them. Marks date back to 1370.

Today in the U.S., migratory waterfowl are protected by state and federal laws. Permits are required to keep wild birds legally. If you are in any doubt about birds you are considering acquiring, check with the state department of fish and game, parks and wildlife or natural resources.

Mute swans are controversial residents along the East Coast, where they have displaced local Trumpeter swans. Mute swans have been acquired as decorative waterfowl for parks and estates, but easily escape and become feral. They are now regarded as unwanted invaders, trashing the fragile wetland habitat in which they live and chasing out native birds. To avoid those problems, the state of New Hampshire requires by law that Mute swans be pinioned, an operation done on young cygnets to remove the distal joint of the wing, making flight impossible. They retain their mythic grip on people, touching the hearts of those who glimpse them gliding across a misty lake. This dichotomy confounds wetlands managers who want at least to control Mute Swans, if not eliminate them entirely.

“They are a beautiful form of biological pollution,” said Jonathan McKnight, associate director for habitat conservation at Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources. Others disagree, citing Mute Swans’ circumpolar migratory route, and claim that they have a historic presence in North America.

Current wildlife control professionals hunt them to reduce the population, which has been successful. Tundra and Trumpeter Swans are unquestionably native birds to North America. They remain protected.

I haven’t found any evidence that swans were ever raised commercially in North America. They are wild birds, the largest flying bird, and formidable aggressors willing to protect their nests. Swans-A-Swimming remain a lovely image, but one not practical for domestic production.

Eight Maids a-Milking

In the 16th and 17th centuries, cattle breeds were as different from modern cattle as poultry breeds are. Devon cattle were among the breeds that the maids may well have been milking.

The American Milking Devon was developed from the breed named for the county Devon in England. It retains good production in milk as well as meat. This Devon heifer, “Fashion 5th,” is an illustration from Livestock and Complete Stock Doctor: A Cyclopedia, by Jonathan Periam and A. H. Baker, published in 1910. The breed is known for fast walking, which allows it to cover fields efficiently. It is a desirable breed for oxen as well as food production.

The Milking Shorthorn, which traces its history back at least to the estates of the nobility of Northumberland in England of those days, would also be a candidate for the hands of those maids.

Significant points for good dairy cows, according to the Stock Doctor, are: “… a small neck, sharp shoulders, small brisket and small bone. Moreover, small bone usually accompanies thrift, and is universally found in improved breeds.”

Milkmaids were associated with good skin at this period of time because they were likely to avoid the smallpox that scarred so many. Because of their close association with cows, they were exposed to cowpox, a much less serious disease that made them immune to smallpox. Edward Jenner relied on this observation to develop the first “vaccine,” a word that comes from the Latin word for “cow.”

12 Days of Christmas Meaning Behind Ladies, Lords, Pipers, and Drummers 

The nine ladies dancing, ten lords a-leaping, eleven pipers piping and twelve drummers drumming also reflect aspects of life in the 18th century. The social system placed Lords and Ladies above the common people living on the farms, the Pipers Piping and Drummers Drumming who entertained them. Their performance would have been an expression of military strength as well as general festivities, dancing and making merry. They all would have appreciated the birds that came to the feast.

Now you know the 12 Days of Christmas meaning and history. Isn’t it fascinating? While we’re on the subject of Christmas carols, what’s your favorite?

Christine Heinrichs is the author of How to Raise Chickens and How to Raise Poultry, Voyageur Press. Both books focus on raising traditional breeds in small flocks. 

Originally published in the December 2013/January 2014 issue of Backyard Poultry.

12 Days of Christmas — Meaning Behind the Birds was originally posted by All About Chickens