Micro-interview with Simon Kewin

Simon Kewin, author of “His New Body” in The Future Fire #64, joins us for a mini-chat.

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Art © 2023 Miguel Santos

TFF: What does “His New Body” mean to you?

Simon Kewin: For me, this is a story about the powerless and the marginalized finding a road and a voice—told as a somewhat off-the-wall urban ghost story! Sometimes, I'm sure, we all feel invisible, and the characters in this little story simply find their own odd ways to rectify that.

TFF: If you had to make yourself a new body from inanimate objects, what would you choose?

SK: Highly-polished wood would look nice, but I'd probably go for something that wouldn't ever wear out. Also, we obviously need to be reusing stuff a lot more—so perhaps discarded scraps of metal and plastic?

TFF: What can you be found doing when you're not creating/writing?

SK: I do a lot of walking and a fair bit of running.

TFF: What are you working on next?

SK: I've just completed the third novel in my Office of the Witchfinder General series (published by Elsewhen Press) and I'm either going to move onto the fourth of those, or perhaps a completely unrelated science fiction novel.

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Extract:

He waited for the safety of night. Night and cold kept the people—the living people—off the streets, and this was a raw winter night of ice and fog. If he stayed away from the bright lights he’d be, at most, just a ghost image on grainy CCTV feeds, easily missed.

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Reminder: You can comment on any of the stories or illustrations in this issue at http://press.futurefire.net/2023/01/new-issue-202364.html.

Micro-interview with Ujjvala Bagal Rahn

We welcome Ujjvala Bagal Rahn, author of the poem “Going Under” in The Future Fire #64, to chat with us about this work, mythology and art.

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TFF: What does “Going Under” mean to you?

UBR: I’m thinking of the depression of people with all their cares, depression& that they deny is happening. Persephone is a sad character, always pulled back underground.

TFF: Do you think stories from mythology tell us about eternal truths, universals that will always be relevant?

UBR: Stories from mythology are wonderful, holy even, because of their ambiguity, as profound as poetry. How fair is it that Persephone is tricked into eating the taboo pomegranate seeds, condemning her to a half-year underground? Yet, why couldn’t Demeter or Persephone find another trick to save her? I’ve thought that swallowing the seeds from the underground world of the dead made her part of it, and so she feels drawn back. Now that I think of it, this myth could also represent addiction. What would be really interesting is a happy interpretation of Persephone's story…

TFF: Would you use a piece of art to tell someone that you love them?

UBR: I have in fact written poems for my husband and daughter, normally about some aspect of them or their lives that resonate with me. My husband and daughter each has a binder to keep copies of “their own” poems— enough for at least a chapbook each, I’d guess. Each poem was a holiday gift.

TFF: What are you working on next?

UBR: I am sending out my second poetry collection Memories Lounge out to competitions. In addition, I like the idea of chapbooks, so I have been collecting poems for three—holidays, Buddha-themed, and on my thirty-plus year relationship with my husband Marty, who has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair.

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Extract:

Like Persephone, you hear
the rivers gurgling in the caves,
like bells that sing, “Come to us,
you know you want to.” Don’t you?

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Reminder: You can comment on any of the stories or illustrations in this issue at http://press.futurefire.net/2023/01/new-issue-202364.html

Micro-interview with Joyce Chng

We’re delighted to have a little chat with Joyce Chng, illustrator of “Solitary” in The Future Fire #64.

TFF: How did you go about illustrating “Solitary”?

Joyce Chng: As usual, I read the story and let the images come to me naturally. For "Solitary", the visual images came easily. First, forests, and then crown shyness.

TFF: Is there a theme-song to your current work-in-progress?

JC: There are many projects I am working on. Contracted gigs and self/personal projects. I have my Joan of Arc “PhD”/independent research. I have also started feeler paragraphs on something I’d always wanted to write for a long time (since 2001!). It’s a fantasy, to say the least. So, the theme-song is “Remembrance” from Delerium’s Karma album. 

TFF: With whom, alive or dead, would you most like to collaborate, and on what?

JC: Terri Windling. I would like to collaborate with her on animal people. (I also miss Terri—met her when she visited Singapore for Singapore Writers' Festival).

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Reminder: You can comment on any of the stories, poems or art in this issue at http://press.futurefire.net/2023/01/new-issue-202364.html.

Micro-interview with Jonathan Olfert

We welcome Jonathan Olfert, author of “The Thousand Tongues of Sara” in The Future Fire #64, to answer a few short questions.

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Art by Cécile Matthey, © 2023

TFF: What does “The Thousand Tongues of Sara” mean to you?

Jonathan Olfert: I found a lot of meaning in the fear and excitement of engaging with a diverse universe through languages and food. I’ve lived in something like fifteen towns and cities across North America: I’ve blundered through language barriers and loved all manner of cuisines.

TFF: What other species on Earth do you think should count as sapient (if we manage not to drive them to extinction in the meantime)?

JO: Drawing a firm person/not-person dichotomy has rarely been on the right side of history, but based on metacognition, tool-making, ritual, humor, and language, yes, some kinds of cephalopods, great apes, and cetaceans are people. Where the rubber hits the road: I eat pork but not octopus.

TFF: What are you working on next?

JO: These days I’m trying genre after genre to see what really clicks. I’ve sold bits of paleofiction, horror, poetry, and sword-and-sorcery, and I’ve given myself permission to write about neurodivergent people like me. Who knows, maybe next year I’ll be engrossed in romance and experimental lit fic. It could happen.

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Extract

Humans, the matriarch Sara understood, experienced time as a thing to be counted, as if days were hyenas guarding a watering hole. They’d used only numbers (310 days each way, plus 40 on the alien world, all carefully translated) to tell her how long she’d be away from Earth. What they should have said, if they cared, was that she’d miss family and sky as long as any of her pregnancies had been, with just as many tears.

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Reminder: You can comment on any of the stories, poems or art in this issue at http://press.futurefire.net/2023/01/new-issue-202364.html.

New Issue: 2023.64

“We need to have a movement that is willing to let everyone speak, to create space, to listen to different voices, to be challenged.”

—Talissa M. Soto

Issue 2023.64

Short stories

• ‘Purity’, Jennifer R. Donohue - art by Fluffgar
• ‘His New Body’, Simon Kewin - art by Miguel Santos
• ‘The Thousand Tongues of Sara’, Jonathan Olfert - art by Cécile Matthey
• ‘Side Effects May Vary’, Avra Margariti - art by Toeken

Poetry

• ‘Going Under’, Ujjvala Bagal Rahn
• ‘Solitary’, David Birch Ellis - art by Joyce Chng
• ‘The Later Life of Herr Samsa’s Picture’, Elizabeth R. McClellan - art by Dr T. Eratopo
• ‘Mageochory’, S. Brackett Robertson - art by Dr T. Eratopo

Download e-book version: PDF | EPUB | Mobi