Ursula Pflug's Blog - Posts Tagged "inanna-publications"
Before Mum Died She Used To Forget Things All The Time, I Can't Remember What It Was That Killed Her In The End
Not long ago Des Lewis wrote a review of my 2008 story collection After the Fires. I'll be at Word on the Street in Toronto on the 27th of September, first at the Inanna booth from 2-4 signing copies of my illustrated flash novel Motion Sickness and then at the Tightrope booth where I'll be signing copies of After the Fires. Des writes amazingly thoughtful and literate reviews on his British Fantasy Award nominated site.
Here is an excerpt describing the first story, filmed by Carol McBride as Waterfront, available for viewing elsewhere on this site.
"Before Mum died she used to forget things all the time. I can't remember what it was that killed her in the end."
Dear U, A series of letters from one to another, the same writer and the same recipient, with no intervening replies, giving a rhythm of meaning, a rhythm of life being collected together, about ‘rodents’ that came to check up on us, about the the clutter, about the surfaces upon which the letters are written, the other people named in that deadpan or oblique rhythm, and the tree or more than one tree with these letters about them … or on them. Love, Des.
ps: the last book of yours I read was fronted with a story with ‘water’ in the title unless my own memory has already lapsed at last.
Read the rest:
https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/...
Here is an excerpt describing the first story, filmed by Carol McBride as Waterfront, available for viewing elsewhere on this site.
"Before Mum died she used to forget things all the time. I can't remember what it was that killed her in the end."
Dear U, A series of letters from one to another, the same writer and the same recipient, with no intervening replies, giving a rhythm of meaning, a rhythm of life being collected together, about ‘rodents’ that came to check up on us, about the the clutter, about the surfaces upon which the letters are written, the other people named in that deadpan or oblique rhythm, and the tree or more than one tree with these letters about them … or on them. Love, Des.
ps: the last book of yours I read was fronted with a story with ‘water’ in the title unless my own memory has already lapsed at last.
Read the rest:
https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/...
Book trailer for Mountain Plus New Reviews
Mountain by Ursula PflugMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
My near-future YA novella Mountain received lovely reviews in Tangent, Cascadia Subduction Zone, The Future Fire and the Ottawa Review of Books among other places. I will see if I can cobble together a few of the links. I've also just posted my son Edward Back's beautiful video here.
Victoria Silverwolf writes:
The narrator is a teenage girl, the daughter of divorced parents. Her father, who does not appear until the end, is a successful musician. With him, she leads a life of credit cards and shopping malls. Her mother travels to communal gatherings, where she uses her technical skills to help those who live there survive off the land with do-it-yourself technology. During one such excursion, she leaves her daughter behind, promising to return in a few days. While the daughter waits, she becomes friends with a boy who has secrets, which remain unrevealed until halfway through the novella. She also records the stories of other young people who have come to the gathering. (These narrations incorporate writings that the author published previously.) Some of these stories are realistic, while others are fantasy. At the end, the narrator finds out what happened to her mother, and matures from adolescence to adulthood.
Read more
here.
Ian Thomas Shaw wrote about Mountain in ORB, the Ottawa Review of Books. His second novel, Quill of the Dove was recently released by Guernica.
The beauty of Pflug's writing is her ability to deliver a narrative which juxtaposes the consumer-driven frivolity of teenagers with their vulnerabilities to harm caused by adults around them. In an age where abuse of any kind is decried in very public spaces with strident calls for draconian measures, Mountain is about healing, not punishment. And in it, we are directed to the importance of victims helping other victims to heal.
There are few writers who can draw their readers into the personae of their characters as eloquently as Ursula Pflug. Mountain is a novel that leaves no room for detached bystanders. It sweeps you up and infuses you with the emotions of its young protagonist and in the end, leaves you enmeshed in her sorrow.
Read more here.
View all my reviews
Where Do You Plant A Seed Someone Gave You In A Dream?
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.
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.
Speculating Canada Interview: Writers Under Quarantine
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.
#
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
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.
#
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
Starred PW review for Seeds and Other Stories
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 it
here
June 11 Virtual Launch for Seeds and Other Stories
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.
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.
Inanna Fall Launch: November 19
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!
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!
