LCRW 33 | The Mossy Skull

The LCRW 33 Interviews: D. K. McCutchen: Star Stuff & Worm Meat

On September 2, 2015 by Michael J. DeLuca in Environmentalism, LCRW 33

D. K. McCutchen is a Senior Lecturer for the UMass College of Natural Sciences. Lack of poetic DNA led to tale of low adventure & high science titled The Whale Road (Random House, NZ; Blake, UK), which earned a Pushcart nomination & a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book award. In a literary attempt to save the world, she’s now writing mostly scientifically accurate, sometimes erotic, gender-bender-post-apocalyptic speculative-fiction. The series begins with Jellyfish Dreaming—finalist for a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship. She lives on the Deerfield River with two brilliant daughters and a Kiwi, who isn’t green, but is fuzzy.

“Jellyfish Dreaming”, an excerpt from the above-mentioned novel of the same name, vies with Giselle Leeb’s “Ape Songs” for the weirdest dystopian future depicted in LCRW 33— a world of deserts and acidic oceans where humans and jellyfish are among the only things left alive, humans live off the jellyfish and are starting to become jellyfish themselves—it is also, disturbingly, the most plausible. For that reason I think this makes an excellent capstone in my series of contributor interviews (read them all here)

Settle in, friends. This one’s good.

The LCRW 33 Interviews: Alena McNamara

On August 26, 2015 by Michael J. DeLuca in Environmentalism, LCRW 33

Alena McNamara lives in Boston and works in a library near a river. Her stories have appeared in Kaleidoscope and Crossed Genres Magazine. She is a graduate of the 2008 Odyssey Workshop and Viable Paradise XV, and can be found online via alenamcnamara.com.

“Starling Road” is a story about imperialism, resistance and an inevitable, unintended consequence of both: people falling in love across cultures.

What inspired you to write this piece?

“Starling Road” rushed out of me after a six-month post-college gap of not writing fiction. Looking back I can see the roots of it in two classes I took my last semesters in undergrad: one on human geography and the other on post-colonial theory. Each only scratched the surface of its subject, but there’s a lot of thoughts from those classes tangled up underneath the surface of “Starling Road”—thoughts about the nation-state, the concept of sovereignty over a piece of land, and how that’s harming the humans who live on this planet. Chiefly the harm rolls down onto those who aren’t “citizens” or who get caught between borders, but we are all limited by these boundaries. Thoughts, too, about the center — periphery model so many of us have of society and the earth. I don’t have any answers but I have a lot of questions, and I thought someone should ask them of epic secondary-world fantasy.

And then Starling and Nisima turned up, and suddenly I was writing the most solely romantic story I’ve composed in my life.

Guest Post by Deborah Walker: Is it just me, or is it getting hot in here?

On August 19, 2015 by Michael J. DeLuca in Environmentalism, LCRW 33

Deborah Walker grew up in the most English town in the country, but she soon high-tailed it down to London, where she now lives with her partner, Chris, and her two young children. Find Deborah in the British Museum trawling the past for future inspiration or on her blog: deborahwalkersbibliography.blogspot.com. Her stories have appeared in Nature’s Futures, Cosmos, Daily Science Fiction and The Year’s Best SF 18 and have been translated into a dozen languages.

In the guest post below, she discusses the inspiration for her story “Medea” and poem “Child Without Summer”, both of which appear in LCRW 33.

Humanity’s a frog being slowly boiled in a saucepan. Most of us in the developed world are too busy to feel the water heating up, to notice that we’re being gradually boiled alive. ‘Medea’ and ‘Child Without Summer’ (written by my alter ego, Kelda Crich) explore this near-sighted tendency, this blindness to events that don’t impact immediately on our stressful day-to-day lives.