Gavin J. Grant. Right lane
must turn right. Left lane must turn left.
Kelly Link. Good things, yes. Bad things, no.
Contents
Fiction
Jan Lars Jensen -- Happier
Days
The theme for our ten year
grad reunion was "Happy Days." I'm not sure why this
particular show was selected, as we had graduated long after
the '50s, and the series had been cancelled before most of us
met in high school. I'm not even sure why we needed a theme
-- a reunion wasn't a prom. But I guess "Happy Days" generated
a feeling of nostalgia that the organizers hoped would rub off
on our event, and few people could claim they had never seen
an episode.
David Erik Nelson -- Bay
Ursula Pflug -- In Dreams We Remember
Richard Parks -- The Plum Blossom Lantern
Michiko's servant girl Mai
carried the deep pink lantern to light their way through the
dark city streets. Mai was dead. Since Michiko was, too, that
didn't seem so strange. In fact, very little about the situation
struck Michiko as odd or even very different from when she was
alive. She did have one regret, however -- her feet. Michiko
missed having feet.
Nick Mamatas -- Found Wedged
in the Side Drawer in Paris, France, 23 December, 1989
Lena DeTar -- Definitions
Jennifer Rachel Baumer -- Spirits of Sage, Wind, and Sun
Philip Raines and Harvey Welles -- The Fishie
Catchie hears first. "'mam!
Noisy in the ground!"
Spitmam
scoops away sleep and releasing Catchie from her bed grasp,
listens for the disturbance beyond the cottage.
"Hear? Under
rock, 'mam! Under and deep, calling to the folk!"
"You say, you
say." In a grumbly witter, Spitmam swings on her longcoat
and unlodges the door. The night's cold as groundstone, but
Spitmam bends stiff knees to lay an ear to one of the pathway
flags.
"You're hearing
it," she tells the girl quietly. "That thumping's
surely under. And a grand thing's there!"
Nonfiction
Jack Cheng -- Mesopotamians,
All
Richard Butner -- How to Make a Martini
"I drink so I can talk
to assholes. This includes me." -- James Douglas Morrison
Drink what you like, so
you can talk to assholes including yourself. But. But you might
want to have a martini. And here's how to make one.
First off, martinis
are made of gin and vermouth. If you make one with vodka, it's
not a martini; it's a vodka martini. If you make one without
vermouth, it's not a martini, it's cold gin, which is a perfectly
fine KISS song but perhaps not a perfectly
fine beverage.
The state of being
in a martini glass does not instantly confer martini-hood on
any given concoction. Some perfectly fine drinks are served
in martini glasses (aka cocktail glasses, as opposed to old-fashioned
glasses or Collins glasses or cordial glasses). Gimlets, say.
Hell, even Lemon Drops. There is no such thing as a Choco-Banana
Martini, though.
L. Timmel Duchamp -- What's
the Story? Reading Deena Metzger's The Woman Who Slept with
Men to Take the War Out of Them
Zines reviews & credits
William Smith -- The Film Column: Don't Look Now
Poetics
Christoph Meyer -- Death
Ditty
Cara Spindler -- Five Poems
Nancy Jane Moore -- Resilience
Anne Sheldon -- Two Poems
Contributors
Jennifer Rachel Baumer
lives in Reno, Nevada, with her husband/best friend/sometime editor
Rick and a rapidly expanding number of cats. She wrote "Spirits"
at Clarion after news from home of a shooting at the local market.
When not writing fiction Jennifer can be found procrastinating
on writing nonfiction, from which she makes a tentative living.
Richard
Butner is a freelance journalist and short story writer.
Hell, he might even write a novel soon. He lives in Raleigh, North
Carolina. He loves you. Read his story "Other
Agents" from LCRW no.5.
His story "Ash City Stomp" provided the inspiration
for Shelley Jackson's painting for the cover of Trampoline.
Jack
Cheng works on archaeological excavations in Turkey and
Syria. He is writing a book on Assyrian music when not playing
with his new son Austin. Earlier contributions to LCRW include
a review of Vanilla Sky,
an email exchange in no.7, and illustrations
in no.4.
Lena
DeTar is currently teaching English in Nara, Japan. She
will be attending a Science Writing (journalism) MA program at
Johns Hopkins next year. As for philosophy, she may be Buddhist.
Or not. It deserves more meditation.
L. Timmel Duchamp is
a regular columnist for LCRW. She has published a prodigious quantity
of fiction in addition to a modest number of essays. She is an
editor at Fantastic
Metropolis. Intrepid voyagers may discover and
explore her work here.
Jan
Lars Jensen grew up in Yarrow, B.C. and currently lives
in Calgary, Alberta. His first novel, Shiva 3000, was published
by Harcourt in North America and Macmillan in the U.K. Raincoast
Books will publish a nonfiction work, tentatively titled Nervous
System, in 2004.
Nick Mamatas is the
author of the Bram Stoker Award-losing short novel Northern
Gothic (Soft Skull Press) and of short stories appearing
in Razor, Strange Horizons,
Wide Angle NY, and The Whirligig. This bio is already
longer than his story, so just look at his website.
Christoph Meyer lives
in Danville, OH. He is an enthusiast. His zine, 28 Pages Lovingly
Bound with Twine, is indeed that, and should be read.
Nancy
Jane Moore's fiction has appeared in various anthologies,
some magazines, and the occasional webzine, but this is the first
time her poetry has appeared anywhere besides her high school
literary magazine. Her story "Three O'Clock in the Morning"
appeared in LCRW no.8.
David Erik Nelson currently
lives somewhere in America with his anonymous fiancee and X number
of dogs. He has never been associated with the publication Poor
Mojo's Almanac(k), and asks that you disregard that vile,
scurrilous rag entirely.
Richard
Parks lives in Mississippi with his wife and three cats.
His work has appeared in Asimov's, Realms of Fantasy, Weird
Tales, and numerous anthologies. His first short story collection,
The Ogre's Wife: Fairy Tales for Grownups, was published
in 2002 by Obscura Press.
A contemporary fantasy/magic
realist novel by Ursula Pflug, Green
Music has recently been released by Tesseract Books. Pflug
has had over forty short stories professionally published, at
home in Canada and internationally in both speculative and mainstream
venues, in print and on the web (Holy
Mackerels, Late for
Dinner, Sky
Rise, Python).
She has frequently written about art and books for Toronto's Now
Magazine and other venues, worked in editorial for three years
at the cultural journal The Peterborough Review, and co-written
several short films including, Memory Lapse At The Waterfront
-- based on a published Pflug short story, it has shown at festivals
and has been sold to television. Pflug has taught writing workshops
to both adults and children. She has read her short fiction at
countless public readings. She has received several Ontario Arts
Council and Canada Council grants in support of her fiction; her
theatre work has also been supported by the OAC and by the Laidlaw
Foundation. She has had three plays professionally staged and
has been writing and performing with Seaskum, a Peterborough based
all girl comedy troupe. She is a member of SF Canada and Broad
Universe. Formerly a full time graphic artist, she has concentrated
on her writing since moving to the rural Kawarthas from Toronto
with her family, fifteen years ago. In their spare time, they
are building a teleporter together.
Philip Raines and Harvey
Welles have published stories in The Fractal, New
Genre, and Albedo One, and have won the UK Bridport
Prize short story competition. Phil is a member of the Glasgow
Science Fiction Writers Circle. Harvey lives in Milwaukee.
Anne Sheldon was born
in Washington, DC, in 1945. Her work has appeared in Poet Lore,
Spitball, Weird Tales, and Edge City Review, among
other small magazines, and in a chapbook, Lancastrian Letters,
and a book, Hero-Surfing.
She is a poet-in-the-schools, working through the Maryland State
Arts Council, and teaches storytelling at the library school of
the University of Maryland.
William Smith is a
regular columnist for LCRW. He is on the cusp of publishing
a zine, Trunk Stories. We are note with awe that his review
of Don't Look Now did not include a reference to that
scene.
Cara Spindler lives
in Michigan and teaches creative writing, in high schools for
money and prisons for free. Her poetry has most recently appeared
in The Driftwood Review, Poor
Mojo's Almanac, and Spinning Jenny.
---
Lady Churchill's Rosebud
Wristlet, No.12 June 2003. LCRW appears twice a year
from Small Beer Press, 176 Prospect Ave., Northampton, MA 01060
info@lcrw.net www.lcrw.net/lcrw
$4 per single issue or $16/4. Contents © the authors. All rights
reserved. Submissions, requests for guidelines,
&c. should be sent to the address above. No SASE: no reply. Thanks
for those, Richard. No extras this time, no footnotes, no recipes
spelled out in the first letter of each story (see no. 8). Apples,
etc. read from back to front. Remove the figure from the head,
what's left? Is there a ship? Is there a state? There is a state,
disunited. Mostly, when we read the news, we are sad. It is annoying
to feel so sad and useless. We want to revolt, but non-violently,
because we do not believe in violence. The ends don't justify
those means and all that. But what does it mean when every day,
every day, another freedom is taken away, another imbalance
is made law, another good law (yes, good) is wiped off the books.
Revolution now.
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