“Climbing Redemption Mountain”
Mikal Trimm

A simple, powerful premise, well thought out and cleanly executed. In his author comment Mikal Trimm calls this (or at least his original version of this) fantasy. But there’s only the one real speculative element, and even that is only subtly speculative: the notion of climbing a mountain to achieve salvation. Sysiphus. Prometheus. Moses on Mt. Zion. Kilimanjaro. It is one of those fundamental elements of story which I most fervently covet, and have such a struggle achieving in my own work: a monumental metaphor. I hold up Borges as the master of this form: the circular ruin, the library as universe, the universe as tiny, unassuming patch of shadow underneath the cellar stairs. But he’s not the only one. Kafka’s cockroach. Hawthorne’s handprint birthmark. The white whale. Foo on fairytale–the foundation of the mythic, the origin of all story and belief on this planet is not fairytale, but monumental metaphor. And to stumble upon a metaphor of such ancient resonance and depth, and recast it in such a way as to grant it an intimate, personal impact on the reader, as Mikal Trimm has done, is what we all ought to be striving for.

“Rats”
Veronica Schanoes

This story opens with several paragraphs of criticism on the pacific nature of fairytale–the opiate effects of allowing oneself the escape of long ago and far away, where all the rules are clearly defined, and good people live happily ever after as long as they obey them. And I agree wholeheartedly with everything she says, especially about the imperialistic nature of story as lie, as voluntary self-deception we impose upon the real world to make it seem more palatable. But she also explains that what follows is a fairytale, and thus suffers from all of these flaws. Which almost makes me want to put the book down. Ms. Schanoes is seriously handicapping herself with an opening like that. I can’t think of too many stories that could follow it and survive. Yet not only does this story overcome the handicap, it actually hits harder because of it.

“Rats” is not a Sleeping Beauty retelling. I would argue it isn’t even a fairytale. It’s the setup for a fairytale, with a ragged hole stuffed full of shattered glass in place of where the fairytale ending should be.

I’m afraid I haven’t got any punk credibility. Since I don’t enjoy the actual music except in isolated cases, I can appreciate punk only as an abstraction, an aesthetic stand. That said, seeing punk wielded as a weapon for smashing fairytale to bits may be the most enjoyment I will ever get out of it.

I don’t really want to give away anything else, because I think this story is perfectly delivered for maximum emotional impact, and I’m afraid I’d detract from that. Suffice it to say that for sheer, raw awesomeness, “Rats” edges out “Pallas at Noon” as my favorite story in this anthology so far.

Nymphalis antiopa

“Burning Beard: the Dreams and Visions of Joseph Ben Jacob, Viceroy of Egypt”
Rachel Pollack

“Burning Beard” mashes together the biblical legend of Joseph, the ancient Egyptian book of dreams, and a modern sensibility, and spins them up into a humanist retelling of the life of Joseph. It’s clear that a fair amount of research went into this, and I’ve no doubt there are all kinds of subtle scholarly references here that are going over my head. She refers to Moses throughout as “the Beard”, his being the burning beard of the title. I would not be at all surprised to learn that some transcription error between dialects back in twelve BC mistranslated the word ‘beard’ to the word ‘bush’, or vice versa. And that is exactly the kind of little speculative cleverness that hooks me. Add to that the fact that she’s constructed this story by threading together two disparate chronologies, one from Joseph’s youth, the other from his old age, and actually pulled it off as an engaging, well-ordered narrative, and you can see why I’m impressed. This is a meticulously crafted story, and though it might not blow my mind or wrench my heart, there’s a lot here worth learning from.

“The Utter Proximity of God”
Michael J. DeLuca

Nobody should be allowed to throw stones at glass houses unless they’re prepared to throw stones at their own.

I read this and I notice flaws. Bumps in the prose I wish I’d fixed. Points where the silliness comes off as wooden and contrived. I guess this is how it feels to read your own work in print.

But there’s still stuff that makes me laugh, anyway, and a play of the kinds of ideas that interest me, with hidden ends of various threads leading off out of the story into others. Which is pretty much the best I can expect.

Theodora Goss compares this story to Samuel Beckett; she called it “the anti-Waiting for Godot“. That interpretation is apt, certainly, though modesty forces me to admit it was not what I intended. I only read Godot after she made that comparison, and while now that I have read it, I can entirely conceive of myself composing a story just to assail Godot‘s verbose, absurdist cynicism, when I was in fact writing this story, I’m pretty sure I was thinking more along the lines of Piers Ploughman, classical pastoral, and a particular Calvino story called “Father to Son”, which is about a pair of grumpy asshole farmers who are pretty much mean to everybody and like it. But in tone, at least, Dora Goss is right: I was looking for optimism, for irreverence, a story critical of religion but condemning of despair.

“A Drop of Raspberry”
Csilla Kleinheincz
translated from the Hungarian by Noémi Szelényi

This is a style of story I was expecting to make its way into the Interstitial fold (as discussed in the “— House” thread): the inanimate narrator story, ie one which uses an anthropomorphic personification as its main character. I think the proliferation of this style may be an offshoot of the recent “deity as main character in modern setting” trend, following Gaiman, which now is pretty much played out. Most often such stories deal in one way or another with the theme of the human condition evaluated from distance, “I am not what they are, thus I understand better than they do how great and terrible they have it.” The successful inanimate-narrator tales I’ve seen treat with this same theme, but without having to concern themselves with addressing the monstrous, limelight-stealing subjects of myth and belief. Unless they want to. Actually, in that respect, I might almost call it a magic realist tactic.

In “A Drop of Raspberry”, a semi-sentient lake saves a grieving man from suicide by drowning. They strike up a friendship, which wobbles precariously on the edge of forbidden romance and ends bittersweet. Ms. Kleinheincz gives us a real, accessible notion of what it feels like to be a lake, using weird bits of synesthesia to convey that sense of difference, of alienness, but not getting so wrapped up in it as to deprive us of emotional attachment to what is at its heart a subtle, poignant tragedy of star-crossed lovers. The notion of the interstitial comes into play here in the space between humanity and… lakeness. The lake can cross over for awhile, inhabit a human body, comprehend the human perspective, or attempt to, but when winter rolls around, she’s going to freeze again. It works almost as a microcosmic, humanist retelling of the life of Christ.

I suspect there is something in the Hungarian title that gets lost in the translation—something about raspberries being both tart and sweet, like our own metaphor about lemons and lemonade. Of course I do not read Hungarian.

“Black Feather”
K. Tempest Bradford

I don’t know if Tempest is actually Ms. Bradford’s middle name. If Tempest was my middle name, well, I’d probably affect it for my pen name too. On paper, however, it strikes me as trying too hard–like Storm Constantine’s completely fakeass-sounding name. Of course, I’m being superficial. Deciding whether you’re going to like a piece of writing based on how you like the author’s name is worse than judging a book by its cover. A picture, at least, is worth a thousand words; a name is worth three, four at most. I guess I’m only bringing up the matter of her name because it’s indicative of a problem I have with this story, at least in this anthology: I don’t think it’s interstitial. I think it’s in here more because of the author’s interstitiality than the story’s. The story, as I see it, is straight-ahead urban fantasy in the style of Gaiman, using all the tropes you’d expect, and no real surprises: ravens, dreams, the obvious dichotomy of black and white, plot structures lifted straight from myth, implausible premises such as the existence of a patch of actual wilderness on the north end of Manhattan. Not that it’s a bad urban fantasy, but any means. It just doesn’t live up to the demands she seems to make of it.

From K. Tempest Bradford’s author bio:

“In response to a question I don’t remember (probably about whether there can be interstitial artists as well as interstitial art), Ellen Kushner said that she didn’t think that a person could be interstitial. I raised my hand and replied ‘I am.’ I have always felt in-between. In-between races, in-between sexual orientations, in-between cultures.”

It comes back to the name: with a name like Storm Constantine, you’d be hard-pressed to sell anything but epic fantasy. To get in under the interstitial umbrella, is it enough to identify yourself as interstitial?

“Black Feather” does briefly acknowledge an in-betweenness in race: the main character, Brenna, is of African, Irish and Native American descent. Yet in a story that is about ancestry, about being defined by one’s past, she passes up a lot of opportunities to engage that in-betweenness. The myths she treats with are all drawn from the usual European roots. At one point we see Brenna make an actual physical retreat from her Algonquian heritage. And her blackness…well, I don’t really get a sense of that at all. She’s almost an everyperson, except for these giant overshadowing mythical intrusions that drive the plot.

I guess I could be asking too much. I generally demand a certain depth from my reading or I get bored. Depth isn’t a characteristic of all genres, and interstitiality seems designed to accommodate all genres, or at least fragments of them. I’ve never cracked a book by Storm Constantine, which would be pretty asshole of me if it were just because of his (her?) name—but there’s also the fact that I just don’t read contemporary straight fantasy anymore from anybody, ’cause I don’t enjoy it.

“Willow Pattern”
Jon Singer
Abstract and short. Almost entirely visual, in a non-visual format. Which is pretty impressive. And unlike a lot of the slipstream short shorts I’ve read, this one actually has something behind the pretty words, a meaning I can dig into. Singer shows me these four simple variations on an archetypal story, and wants me to see an entire culture, a march of generations, a breadth of individuality of minds that no single main character in your usual point A to point B narrative could convey. And best of all, he closes it with what may be the only really humble author commentary in the whole book. He calls attention to his flaws. He’s saying, this is the only way I know how to write, the only way I can write, and if you want to call me interstitial and pay me for it, thank you–but don’t go calling me the spearhead of some new movement. Or at least that’s how it reads to me.

“Pallas at Noon”
Joy Marchand
This is what I was hoping for when I cracked this book. A story where I don’t have to talk about whether it’s interstitial or not because it doesn’t matter. This story transcends genre, rises above it—rather than trying to talk at genre, or batter itself against genre’s walls until one or the other falls down. “Pallas at Noon” has beauty, soul, and meaning, the virtuosity of Kelly Link without the glassy, unassailable precision. There are risks taken here, and sacrifices, and my heart came close to being actually wrenched. This is a story about failed love and creativity and the struggle between. It turns on a stanza of poetry that appears halfway through, breaks itself by the end, and only gives you half the satisfaction you’re expecting, yet everything you need. There is a cautionary tale here for the plight of the artist in the interstice–and here, in this one case, I think I’m willing to extend that classification to everyone who ever reads this blog. Yes, you. Artist, writer, creator of whatever chameleon color, liver in the world, whoever you are: I’m telling you to read “Pallas at Noon”.

I tried to write a story like this once, and it came out simplistic and overwrought and unconvincing. Joy Marchand outwrites me like I’m just some superfluous character she realized she didn’t need.

I think I can quote the last lines without giving anything away but the beauty and surprise of them:

“Gathering the ocean spray around her like a cloak of invincibility she floats toward the far horizon, and then blasts off like a rocket into the high noon sun.”

Damn. I mean, damn.

“Post Hoc”
Leslie What
A lonely, pregnant woman comes upon the desperate solution of mailing herself to her ex-boyfriend, but ends up lost in mailroom limbo. Another literal translation of interstitiality into physical form, and as such an apt metaphor for itself. Finding herself in one of these unaccounted-for cracks, Stella experiences a slow slippage from indignation to acceptance to second-nature. I found this a little gimmicky and a little glib. The cleverness of the idea carries more weight than it should have to. I don’t really get drawn in. The metaphor of mailroom limbo for post-relationship limbo doesn’t really come around to any satisfying close, In part I think because Stella’s solution to her problem was so terrible and wrongheaded to begin with. As a result, I don’t believe in the character or her emotions–I just go ‘Heh, post hoc. Clever.’ and move on.