Perhaps some of you are aware of my love for the spoken word. The way prose rolls off the tongue. The rhythms of speech, the breaking of rhythms, for the purpose of furthering meaning, furthering impact, furthering the capacity of words to cut through that haze you have floating around you full of ads and text messages and layer on layer of thin partitions separating you from what you experience.

Well, I noticed I had a hole in my day, which I was mostly filling with NPR. Which is fine, but it gets repetitive. Really. Try listening to NPR news for half an hour two days in a row. Try it for 20. There is a certain style of delivery which newscasters follow without variation. It gets numbing. Lulling. I realized I’d much rather be learning to tell a good story.

So today I made my first earnest attempt at partaking of some fiction podcasts. And I liked them so much I thought I’d share what I found.

1. Elizabeth Bear, “The Chains that You Refuse”. Title story of her new collection. Downloaded from her blog here.
2. Escape Pod, a speculative podcast periodical. Episode 94, which included a really cool endearing story by Kay Keynon about the Loch Ness Monster.
3. Paul Jessup, “The Happiness of Pinned Wings”. A deep, dark zombie thing. Made me sad. From the Grendelsong podcasts.
4. Jeff Vandermeer on Why Fantasy is Important. Articulate and genre-independent. From the Odyssey podcasts.

Amy and Diana are fundraising to run the 2007 Boston Marathon on the Tufts University team. Please go donate them some money.

Amy: http://www.tuftsmarathonchallenge.com/runners/amydeluca
Diana: http://www.tuftsmarathonchallenge.com/runners/dianadeluca

Danielle is spending a semester abroad in Spain. I made her a blog so she could tell us all about it.

“…clenched tight as a dogwood bud in January.” — Cold Mountain

On January sixth it was seventy degrees in Boston. Deluded birds took up mating songs. In Jamaica Plain a cherry tree bloomed, in Medfield a honeysuckle. I drove about with the windows rolled down and went for a walk in the woods without a coat. I felt torn between a feeling of despair, of insurmountable loss, and one of defiant pleasure. Seventy-degree days in January in New England tend to put one in mind of doomsday. But it was hard not to notice, as clouds broke over mountains and fragments of rainbows appeared, how beautiful the world remained.

On the evening of February second, the first even remotely significant snow of the year fell in Sunderland. Fluff built up on the branches of fir trees. The air was filled with a quiet whisper and a subtle scent like cotton, and vast open fields felt small and comforting and familiar. People drove unnecessarily slow. I wore my Paddington Bear coat with the hood up and paused to shake off the snowflakes when I went indoors. The next morning there were footprints everywhere and the sidewalks were clear. The wind had knocked all the snow from the branches. No more than three inches had fallen.

People growing up in New England in coming years, as the world gets warmer, won’t really notice the change. They’ll think the nostalgia of the older generation for snowball fights and sledding to be quaint, but overly emotional, even irrational. It will be warmer, after all. Less fabric will be required for coats. Towns will get by on smaller snow-clearing budgets. Ploughs will rust. Fewer traffic accidents will occur. Nobody will bother to put snow tires on anymore. Gardners will become more daring.

I’ll be one of those irrational older people, trying to convince kids that they’re missing something. Which isn’t to say I won’t get caught up in the change, won’t learn to enjoy the way things are. What I’ll miss most, though, what will give me away as belonging to the class of fuddy-duddies, will be the way I cling to the metaphors.

Perhaps a new class of fantasy will emerge. Cold-weather nostalgia. The endless Winter of the Wardrobe will switch sides, become a symbol of good and beauty. Images like rosy cheeks, personifications like Jack Frost, becoming more and more inapt, will come more and more into vogue. The notion of a father building an igloo for his children in their front yard will evoke the mystical awe of knights and castles.

Maybe I ought to propose an anthology now. Get ahead of the game.