Meekling Press fundraiser

We welcome this visit from Rachel Linn, whose wonderful story “Glow in the Dark” we published a few years ago, and who has since illustrated several pieces for us. Rachel is here to talk about the Meekling Press fundraiser, and we'll let her tell you what that’s all about.

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I first heard about Meekling Press from an editor at The Coachella Review who had accepted one of my illustrated nonfiction pieces. She said that she liked my illustrations as they were, but thought I should consider making handmade books to create more play between content and form. Meekling Press is dedicated to producing books in creative formats (I particularly love On the Stairs and Muscles Involved, both of which you can see at meeklingpress.com/books). I sent them a proposal for a project, a surreal series of linked stories (an earlier draft was a choose-your-own-adventure story) with moving illustrations, which was accepted and will be coming out around this time next year. The video and image in this post are some of the prototypes for this book (not the finished illustrations, which we’ll be working on over the spring and summer). I would love to see additional fantastical stories housed in strange book formats—and I particularly enjoy creating books that encourage reader interaction.

Concept video for Household Tales

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Here’s their fundraiser pitch:

Meekling has been making and publishing weird and nifty books and objects since 2012. We started with a tiny little 3x5 letterpress, and with the help of our awesome community, we’ve made more than 20 publications, from hand-sewn chapbooks to floppy disk ebooks, to an accordion book that stretches all the way across the room, and a manifesto in the shape of a trash can. We’ve also turned our fictional lecture series, Meekling TALKS, into an annual tradition. We love making publications that play with the relationship between form and content and we’re hoping to continue doing that while bringing it to a bigger audience. We’re starting to travel outside of Chicago and make lots of new friends, and we’re also starting to get all Legitimate, doing things like getting ISBN numbers and Forming a Business and getting better Distribution for our Books—stuff that will help us help our authors spread their words farther and wider.

We’ve got seven books lined up for the next couple years, and we need your help to take this gosh darn press to the next level and get these dang bloody books printed and out into the world. With lots & lots of wild and woolly “Prizes,” we’re putting the FUN back in FUNdraiser…

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Here’s how Meekling describe my forthcoming book (which you can also pick up through the fundraiser):

Household Tales, by Rachel Linn: Feral children, a polar bear, scissors and paper, a snowstorm, a disorienting free fall. This one’s going to be a pop-up book.

“It wasn’t the bear that had scarred her, but it would do. She even preferred this animal because it was a mythic, previously unknown species—perhaps the only one of its kind. Her hands balled into fists and she punched quietly at the snowy walls of her hiding place, biding her time. She did not want to die, she wanted to kill.”

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You can see more examples of my work or get in touch through my website at rslinn.com.

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Find out more about Meekling Press at meeklingpress.com, or support their fundraiser at Indiegogo.

Mediterranean Dark Literature Survey

Over the next few months, we’ll be running a series of posts showcasing the dark and speculative literary scenes in the countries of the Mediterranean region.

While working on the project that led to the Fae Visions of the Mediterranean anthology we came into contact with a diverse and stimulating range of authors and literary traditions, were introduced to new insights, unexpected connections and new friends. We want to learn more about this whole region, and we think that other readers and editors might benefit from this information as well, so we’re asking people to share it here. We have in the back of our mind the possibility that we may be inspired by this ongoing community and friendship to put together more anthologies in the Visions of the Mediterranean series at some point in the future.

Fae Visions of the Mediterranean cover art, © 2016 Tostoini

Hallowe'en Special: horror stories from TFF

If you’re looking for a few dark and bloody tales to read for the Hallowe’en season, we’ve a list of 35 such stories to share with you—taken from the annals of TFF over the last ten years. Maybe we should make an anthology of these some day…

If you like your horror fairly classic: more or less contemporary, and some combination of supernatural or violent, here are the stories that might be up your dark, deserted alley:

• ‘Half Light House', J.W. Bennett
• ‘Nasmina's Black Box’, Jennifer Marie Brissett
• ‘Dare’, Sophie Clarke
• ‘Final Passage’, Addison Clift
• ‘Monsters’, Amelie Daigle
• ‘Pianissimo’, Alan Frackleton
• ‘The Exaggerated Man’, Terry Grimwood
• ‘Coffin Road’, Terry Grimwood
• ‘Kemistry’, Terry Grimwood
• ‘The Harpy’, Laura Heron
• ‘Happy Days’, Jerome Kemp
• ‘Deadline’, Tom Lichtenberg
• ‘Once Again’, Allen McGill
• ‘Made Light’, Melissa Moorer
• ‘Bottom Drawer’, Brett Alexander Savory
• ‘Nettles’, Arley Sorg

If you don't mind a bit of secondary world in your horror, dark fantasy, historical, post-apocalyptic or dark steampunk, then some of these might be more your steaming mug of horse blood:

• ‘The Death Park’, Duncan Barford
• ‘Lost Chapters: A fairytale’, J.W. Bennett
• ‘The Wolf Behind the Sun’, Johann Carlisle
• ‘What Hath God Wrought?’, Neil Carstairs
• ‘The Issuance of One Hundred and Thirty-Six ’, Mark Harding
• ‘Shadow Boy and the Little Match Girl’, C.A. Hawksmoor
• ‘Bluebird Magick’, Alexis A. Hunter
• ‘Until the Pit is Dug for the Wicked’, John Kratman
• ‘Only the Dogs Bark’, Dawn Lloyd
• ‘Survive!’, Cory McMillen
• ‘The Dark One's Cry’, Barbora P.
• ‘American Golgotha’, Joe Pitkin
• ‘Sweet Like Fate’, Sara Puls

 

And if you like a touch of surrealism or magical realism while your heckles are being raised, sample some of these other-worldly beauties…

• ‘Wings So Foreign’, Frank Ray Ard
• ‘All Along the Mall’, Chloe N. Clark
• ‘What the Dead Are For’, Terry Grimwood
• ‘Fragmentality’, Sandra M. Odell
• ‘Night Dreaming’, Steven Pirie
• ‘Wingspan’, Aliya Whiteley

For more like this, follow The Future Fire for the next ten years, or check out our Fae Visions of the Mediterranean anthology—call for stories open for the next two weeks; volume will appear in the new year!

S is for Surrealism

After the recent death of my favourite visual artist of all time, Mexican painter Leonora Carrington, at the age of 94, “Surrealism” has usurped the many other candidates for speculative fiction sub-genres beginning with the letter “S” that could have made it into this blog marathon. In many ways this art form needs no one to defend its inclusion in a magazine focusing on social-political and weird writing: it shares with magic realism a respectable history of worldwide, cosmopolitan, intellectual and fiercely political practitioners. The earliest surrealists were protesting against the reactionary, against bourgeois materialism and fascist imperialism, which are high among the enemies we array ourselves against. And surrealist works are by definition “weird”, in every sense, containing as they do unrealistic details, counter-intuitive settings and events, and stories that tell a story with tone and imagery more than with linear plot and rational representations of the human condition. (It’s for this reason that I’ve never seen the point of recent pseudo-genres like “bizarro”, whose claim to create outside of the restrictions of genre or good taste do nothing that surrealism has not done before, and usually do it not as interestingly. Sub-genres like absurdism, magical realism and the dreamlike weird tale do a better job of taking the struggle forward.)

Contrary to André Breton, most good surrealist work is not “automatisme psychique pur”, or automatic writing. Paintings like Dali’s or Carrington’s are superbly crafted by well-trained draftsmen; perhaps the origin of a surreal story may be a dreamlike or unconscious mental state, but the execution is usually very well planned and polished. Most truly automatic writing is pretty unreadable; even if from the pen of a great stylist or poet, the lack of structure and story divorces it from most interest. Writing is after all an act of communication, which usually requires at least two actors; if the reader is not a party to this act of communication, the writing is likely to fail. Surreal or semi-surreal stories that we have published (e.g. ‘Wingspan’, ‘Omega, maybe’, ‘Wings so Foreign’) have had a very clear plot as well as riotous and mold-breaking imagery.

This is not to say that writing should be easy to interpret and without challenge for the reader; on the contrary, we have always argued that good writing should shock the reader out of their lazy expectations and comfortable world-view. Surrealism does this par excellence, with unexpected juxtapositions and alarming non sequiturs to disturb the reader’s peace of mind, and with the freedom to imagine worlds different from our own, better or worse in some details, radically experimenting in response to the conservatism of the establishment. It will of course be a matter of taste whether a given piece is too unstructured to be readable or not, and while our tastes may not be as avant garde as some radical Dada surrealists might like, we’re very keen on the kind of freedom that comes from being taken out of your comfort zone.

And just as I could stare for hours at the beauty of Leonora Carrington’s mind-blowing paintings, so I want to read stories that are beautiful and mind-blowing as well as useful and politically informed.