Ursula Pflug's Blog

Dust Devil on a Quiet Street by Richard Bowes

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Richard Bowes died on Christmas Eve. I'd never heard of him but author, editor and critic Matthew Cheney mentioned his "speculative memoirs" and that was enough to send me looking. Dust Devil on a Quiet Street describes decades in the east and west villages where I lived for a year in the late 70s. We never met, not then and not at SF Conventions later on, in spite of the delightful wasted hours we each spent as part of the passing parade in Washington Square and Tompkins Square Park. Bowes was a wild kid too and cleaned up just in time, settling into a job at the library at NYU where he wrote urban fantasy novels but Dust Devil is so much more. Bowes witnessed the Stonewall Riots and the fall of the towers. The Hole in The City, his story about 9/11, included here, is still read on public radio every year. I've been reading and writing more memoir for a few years now, most unpublished and now suspect that without fictional and speculative elements I'm not at my most truthful. Bowes' "speculative memoir" inspires as it shows a way forward. Hospital ghosts, murderous love triangles, telepathic performance poets, the constant intrigue of street level east village antics as artists, writers and critics rub shoulders with drug dealers and narcs, inspiring work that will make their names if their habit or their sugar daddy doesn't get them first. His prose is gorgeous as he describes not just lovers and lifelong friends but the otherworldly characters he met during drug and anesthesia hallucinations, some of whom followed him through life and if he wasn't so sane he might have wondered more than he did if he was crazy. He writes about the street and about overlapping realities with courage, curiosity and intelligence and we are the richer for it. A kindred spirit, a time traveler, who took the time ten years ago to give us this book and I'm more than grateful for it. Safe travels, Richard. Highly recommend. #bookstagrammer #urbanfantasy #bookreviews #richardbowes #writerscommunity



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Dust Devil on a Quiet Street

Food of My People: The Exile Book Of Anthology Series Number Nineteen is available for preorder. Co-edited by Candas Jane Dorsey and I, it borrows its title from her story, previously published in Playground of Lost Toys, which I co-edited with Colleen Anderson.

Eating is a symbolic and magical act--a transformation, a covenant, a ritual, a comfort, a necessity--but all through history, food-themed stories have also had their dark sides. Food can be integral to the magic, the meetings, and the processes of fantastical fiction: from myth and legend to high fantasy, from hard-science speculative fiction to post-modern magic realism, from Hansel and Gretel to Soylent Green, from Persephone to 2001, from Alice in Wonderland to Alien. In this anthology, Ursula Pflug and Candas Jane Dorsey, two award-winning senior writers of literary speculation, have gathered a range of speculative writing that recognizes both our attraction to the candy coating and our fascination with the poisoned apple. Paired with each story is a recipe, real or fantastical, for food mentioned in the story: consume at your own risk!

Our amazing authors include established luminaries and newcomers including Richard Van Camp, Melissa Yuan-Innes, Geoffrey W. Cole, Chris Kuriata, Sheung-King, Kathy Nguyen, Kate Story, Sang Kim, Casey June Wolf, Nathan Adler and many more!

Please join us at the Inanna Fall Launch on Thursday November 19th. I`ll be reading from Seeds, my third story collection. Seeds has received lovely reviews both at home and south of the border, including a starred review in PW.

More info here.

I’ll be reading with Carol Rose GoldenEagle, Caro Soles, Laurie Ray Hill and Lisa de Nikolits. There will also be a live Q and A.

On Wednesday I was part of an event at WordUp Barrie, presenting with my colleague and dear friend Candas Jane Dorsey. What a delightful supportive community there is in Barrie! I read an excerpt from Judy, a pandemic story in Seeds. It`s one of my first published stories, appearing in the still-running This Magazine over thirty years ago.

Links to some of the videos are posted on my website here.

Enjoy the recordings!

My mom took a printmaking course at Three Schools of Art. The same night, my aunt M and I studied pottery with the brilliant Isolde who knew my grandmother and had a live/work studio in a basement in the Markham village. After class M and I would pick up Christiane at Three Schools and we’d go for tea and soup to one of the Hungarian restaurants on Bloor Street before heading home.

One of my mom’s prints hangs on the wall, here in Karen DuToit and Heinz Kornagel’s apartment on MacPherson...The ship in the print is named Greenpeace. It was the first Greenpeace expedition, to Amchitka, in the Aleutian Islands off the coast of Alaska. My mother was inspired by the story and created the image in one of her first prints.

“In 1969 the U.S. conducted nuclear tests on the tiny island of Amchitka. Fearing the blast would result in an earthquake, thousands of protesters gathered at the U.S.-Canada border in order to stop the test. Their protests failed as the U.S. detonated its bomb and then announced plans for another test in 1971. As a result, a group of concerned Vancouver environmentalists formed the Don’t Make A Wave committee whose goal was to stop the second test.

“Despite two separate attempts, Greenpeace never made it to the test zone and was unable to stop the U.S. from completing its testing at Amchitka. However, Greenpeace succeeded in causing a flurry of public outcry in the international community. Five months after its voyage to Amchitka, the United States announced it was halting all nuclear tests in the Aleutian Islands. Amchitka was later declared a bird sanctuary.”

View the image and read more here.

A Harsh and Private Beauty by Kate Kelly

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I reviewed this wonderful family saga for ORB, the Ottawa Review of Books:

"Educator and spoken word artist Kate Kelly's debut novel A Harsh and Private Beauty follows a family of Irish immigrants to prohibition-era Chicago. Progeny of a family uprooted from the culture and tradition of their native Ireland, brothers Michael and Daniel Kenny take to the mean streets to forge a living. Well, Michael anyway. He urges his little brother, always the bright one, to stay in school while he and his friends struggle to navigate the emerging gang culture. Becoming a rum-running gang’s accountant isn’t quite what we’d imagined for sensitive Danny, but life sometimes foils our expectations and that’s an underlying theme of Kelly’s—do we become embittered or adapt to reduced or changed circumstances?"

Read More Here



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Santiago's Purple Skies at Morning's Light by Bernadette Gabay Dyer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I wrote a review of this lovely book for The Miramichi Reader:

Sixteen-year-old Kathleen Dunkley lives in a small Ontario town several hours north of Kingston. After her parents die in an automobile accident, a neighbour sends her to Toronto with the address of an old friend. It turns out the old friend has passed on, and the current owner of the house, a gentlemanly Jamaican immigrant by the name of Walker T. Robinson takes Kathleen in. His other tenants are two young women, Gracie and Claudia. When Claudia unexpectedly inherits a historical plantation house in Jamaica, she asks her landlord and her best friend Gracie to help her settle her affairs there as she is unfamiliar with the country. Walker T. insists Kathleen joins them as he feels affection for the girl and is protective. Once in Jamaica, they stay in a beachfront hotel in Montego Bay on their way to Santiago House and here the vivid descriptions of beautiful Jamaica begin.

The locals warn the party that the property is haunted by Santiago, a child of Spanish descent kept captive by the White Witch Annie Palmer, the infamous owner of Rose Hall, a nearby plantation house rife with secrets. The plot races from the discovery of secret underground passages to the appearance of duppies or ghosts in the Jamaican patois to altercations with drug dealers. Between supernatural and other sorts of adventures Claudia, Gracie and Kathleen each find romance and their romantic adventures are discussed over tea or rum punch as much as their worries about hauntings, armed home invaders, storms, fire and more. What doesn’t happen to them? Dyer is adept, not just at taking us on a tour of her homeland so vivid we feel as if we are there but to keep us turning pages.

Read more here.



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At Inanna Publications we’ve been having fun reaching audiences in new ways during quarantine. I recently read from the title story, Seeds and posted the Youtube link under videos.

Please come to the virtual launch of Seeds on June 11.

I’ll be reading with Lisa Braxton, Paul Butler, April Ford, and Rebecca Luce-Kapler. There will be an author Q and A as well as an opportunity to purchase signed books. Hope to see you!

Please find the Crowd Cast link

here.

Pflug’s excellent third story collection (after Harvesting the Moon) showcases her mature, rich, and immersive storytelling. The stories reflect Pflug’s characters’ resilience in the face of 27 disparate apocalypses, united by motifs of seeds and gardening and a striking juxtaposition of hyperrealism with delicate fantasy. Standouts include “Mother Down the Well,” in which a woman seeks to recover the mother she’s never met from the bottom of a mysterious well; the title story, about a lonely older woman who cares for younger people and plants in apocalyptic times; “Unsichtbarkeit,” about an invisibility spell and its impact on a love triangle; and “The Dark Lake,” a decadent examination of domesticity and magic. Pflug’s careful, detailed worldbuilding is beautiful and the recurring motifs of nature, portals to other worlds (“Mother Down the Well,” “The Lonely Planey Guide to Other Dimensions,” “Myrtle’s Mania”), and personal notebooks (“The Dark Lake,” “The Meaning of Yellow”) make the collection feel cohesive and powerful. Readers are sure to be wowed. (June)

Read it
here

Read the full interview here:
Speculating Canada Authors In Quarantine

Spec Can: What have you been up to during the COVID-19 outbreak?

Ursula Pflug: Folks have told me they feel as though they are living in one of my stories and there is a story in my third collection, Seeds and Other Stories, which has just gone to press, that’s about a pandemic.

Seeds is launching virtually on June 11 — it’s possible to register online in advance — please do. This book spans decades, it includes work that has appeared in award winning genre and literary publications in the US and the UK as well as at home in Canada. It’s my third collection and is coming out from Inanna, a Toronto scholarly and feminist press. The cover, which includes seeds and spaceships, is by Val Fullard who does all the Inanna covers. I know her from the old days in the Queen West scene in Toronto when she played in women’s bands with mutual friends. It’s one of my fave covers ever, and illustrates the cover story.

The pandemic story is called “Judy”, and was first published in 1983 in This Magazine, back when it was still edited by Lorraine Filyer. The first line is “That was the summer all the non smokers died”, and it follows a citizen scientist who stays up all night crunching data and then joins her roommates on the roof for a drink and to watch the sunrise. They’ve been there partying all night and mock her, just a little, but it’s her science that makes the correlations between smoking and survival. My husband is high risk not just because he’s over 65 but because he smokes and he was gratified when I told him about this surreal science fictional premise.

I spent the early days of lock down in copy-edits for this book, the usual fiddly and time consuming back and forth and it was actually a welcome relief because while the amazing Luciana Ricciutelli and I discussed whether hanafuda, liliko’i, poi, and wasabi should be italicized (yes, yes, yes, no) time went by during which I wasn’t, gratefully, thinking about Covid at all.

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There’s a 6 k walk on the side roads around my village and I do it almost every day, Covid or not. I get ideas but mostly I clear my head. There are more people out walking now; we wave and stay on our own sides of the road. And I observe birds, even though I’m not really a birder. There are often ravens fluttering around the hydro poles, and on the fence of one of the farms there is a sign which reads, Raven Predation Project Participant. Me being me I had to find out what raven predation was so I went home and looked it up. The raven predation project is a Ministry of Agriculture initiative. Apparently ravens will prey on livestock, pecking out the eyeballs of living sheep and other animals. Now when I come home Doug says, “I see you foiled the ravens and still have your eyeballs.” I am not making this up. If I was a horror writer I would use it but I’m not. Go ahead and you’re welcome.

June 11 Launch Info

The stories in my new collection Seeds span decades in my life and include one of my earliest fiction publications. "Judy" was published in This Magazine in 1983. Lorraine Filyer was editor then and was delighted when I told her I wanted to illustrate the story myself. My husband and I left Toronto for rural Peterborough County in the late eighties, and it's where most of the stories were written. Many of my straightforwardly sf and f pieces appeared in earlier collections including the 2014 collection Harvesting the Moon, published by PS in the UK.

This collection includes more experimental and literary pieces. On a recent panel at Novel Idea in Kingston with Lisa de Nikoliits, she pointed out that Inanna is a genre-busting press and I think this is true — science fiction or noir that's too literary in style for a genre press, fantasy that's more prose poem than short story — Inanna is open to publishing these sorts of works as a more commercial genre press may not be and they fill an important need in this regard.

Some of the pieces first appeared in the 90's in The Peterborough Review, a literary quarterly edited by George Kirkpatrick, Julie Rouse, and an ad hoc collective of volunteers that included me. Beautifully designed, the journal was noticed and admired before, after a few seasons, it folded for all the usual reasons. It was here that I began editing others' work for publication, and also deepened my understanding of the ways in which building and participating in a strong regional arts community extends benefits far beyond the stack of journals — the objects — that still grace my vanity shelf. Before we became rural expats I'd written an art column for Toronto's Now Magazine — so my engagement with local talent and publishing at P. Review was a continuation of work I'd already been doing.

I'm a regional author who teaches in community centres and University Continuing Education programs rather than in online classes as many of my peers do. My students, co-teachers and I meet face to face — we know people in common; we gossip and organize writers' groups and coffee dates outside of class. This isn't accidental — it's crucial in the creation of a flourishing local scene. At the same time I publish in award winning genre publications in the US and the UK as well as Canada, and I like to think that I help to shine a light on our wonderfully rich local community by doing so.

I'm going off on a tangent here, talking about community more than about my writing, but we don't really exist outside of community, however much, at times, we like to think so. This book exists because of granting bodies, because of interested editors at the amazing journals and anthologies where these stories previously appeared, and because my husband didn't think of co-parenting as "babysitting". We achieve what we achieve partly because of who we have around us.

When I wrote the stories that appeared in The Peterborough Review, I was living on a farm in eastern Peterborough County. I was looking after small children, a rambling log farmhouse and a large vegetable garden. It was hard to find time to write, partly, I’m sure, because I hung cloth diapers out, more fool me. But I was disciplined and wrote every day — writing was important and I had the role model of my mother, the painter Christiane Pflug, who painted... most of the day every day whether she felt like it or not. Doug was a devoted dad and played with the kids while I worked when he was home from the city. I had a little room on the second floor overlooking the driveway; across the road lay a swamp where the dogwoods filled with chorus frogs every spring. I had a Canada Council grant to work on short fiction — never underestimate the importance of funding — especially in Canada where writers and publishers compete for readers with US publishers with far greater resources. Notice I am telling a Woolfian kind of tale here — about a room of one’s own, childcare, and a stipend — it’s all still relevant.