I’m a little late to the party on this one, but nevertheless I am delighted to announce that Sybil’s Garage no. 7 went on sale this week.  I had a blast helping out with this magazine — finding gems in the slush, guiding authors on rewrites,  and copy editing.  I’m rather proud to see it in print, but my buddy Matt Kressel contributed the overwhelming majority of the work and the vision, and the whole endeavor is really his baby.

Here’s the blurb:

Where can you find a television that sees five minutes into the future? Where can you find dragons trapped in a jar and an illness which turns people into glass? Where might you find families who sell their brainpower to corporations for penny wages, or dead relatives that sit down for family meals?

Why, in the pages of Sybil’s Garage No. 7, of course.

In this seventh issue of the highly acclaimed series, you will find twenty-seven original works of fiction and poetry from today’s top talent, with suggested musical accompaniment, our trademark design aesthetic, and much more. But be sure to leave a trail of breadcrumbs on your way into Sybil’s Garage, or you may not find your way out.

6″x9″, 206pp
ISBN: 978-0-9796246-1-2

Available from Senses Five Press, Amazon.com, BarnesAnd Noble.com and other fine bookstores.

For more information click here.

Table of Contents:

Fiction

“By Some Illusion” — Kathryn E. Baker
“Suicide Club” — Amy Sisson
“The Noise” — Richard Larson
“A History of Worms” — Amelia Shackelford
“Thinking Woman’s Crop of Fools” — Tom Crosshill
“The Unbeing of Once-Leela” — Swapna Kishore
“How the Future Got Better” — Eric Schaller
“The Telescope” — Megan Kurashige
“Under the Leaves” — A.C. Wise
“The Ferryman’s Toll” — Sam Ferree
“The Tale of the Six Monkeys’ Tails” — Hal Duncan
“The Poincaré Sutra” — Anil Menon
“Kid Despair in Love” — M.K. Hobson
“My Father’s Eyes” — E.C. Myers
“An Orange Tree Framed Your Body” — Alex Dally MacFarlane
“The Watcher Thorn” — Cheryl Barkauskas
“Other Things” — Terence Kuch
“The Dead Boy’s Last Poem” — Kelly Barnhill

Poetry

“Seven League”s — Lyn C. A. Gardner
“One October Night in Baltimore” — Jaqueline West
“Indian Delight” — Alexandra Seidel
“Candle for the Tetragrammaton” — Sonya Taaffe
“Emigrant” — Linsdey Duncan
“Schehirrazade” — Amal El-Mohtar
“The Hyacinth Girl” — Adrienne J. Odasso
“Pathways Marked in Silver” — Marcie Lynn Tentchoff
“Rain ” — Juliet Gillies

Non-Fiction

“Glourious Homage: Quentin Tarantino’s Love Letter to Cinema” — Avi Kotzer

Fantasy Magazine has published an Author Spotlight interview to accompany “Stereogram of the Gray Fort, in the Days of Her Glory.”  I discuss writing the story, and also attempt to describe what makes a successful writing group.

The story has already gotten some feedback.  In an absurdly flattering review in Locus, Rich Horton writes:

And speaking of writers beginning to attract attention, I was impressed last year by Paul M. Berger’s Interzone piece “Home Again”.  Now he contributes a brilliant story to Fantasy, one of the stories of the year so far, “Stereogram of the Gray Fort, in the Days of her Glory”

I guess that kidney I gave him really paid off.

I’m delighted to announce that my story “Stereogram of the Gray Fort, in the Days of Her Glory,” has been published in Fantasy Magazine.  I’m a big fan of this publication, and I’m very happy this piece has found a good home there.

A couple of different things came together to inspire this story.  The first was a trip.  Last spring I was in India on business for the Day Job.  I’ve done a fair amount of traveling, but everything people had been telling me about India turned out to be true, and I’ve never been anywhere that challenged me or inspired me so much in such a short time. I was cooped up in offices and hotels for most of my stay, but I managed to steal some time for myself and get out and look around.

The Gray Fort in my story is modeled after complexes built by Mughal emperors in the 1500’s and 1600’s.  They’re called “forts” today, but they’re the size of towns, surrounded by moats and immense walls, and they contain military garrisons, palaces, audience halls and mosques, all in various states of renovation and ruin.

The same people built the Taj Mahal, which is right down the road from Agra Fort (and to my surprise, the Taj Mahal surpassed all the hype I’d heard about its beauty).

For a few dollars I hired a guide for a day.  He was a high school History teacher who moonlighted on weekends (and probably made more this way than from his regular salary).  He had a master’s degree and spoke five languages well enough to conduct day-long tours in them, including Japanese, which he had taught himself.  He had given his spiel so many times that he compacted every list of architectural features and souvenirs for sale into one long, sing-song word.  It was a surprise to him that I didn’t want him to carry my camera and take snapshots of the scenery for me.  (He would occasionally lead me through areas crowded with hawkers, and each time he would instruct me beforehand that although he would appear to be encouraging me to buy from them, that was just because he had to interact with them on every tour, and I should under no circumstances give them any money.)  Whether he intended it or not, every time he spoke he drew my attention to the fact that here was a talented, dignified man, from a culture that had achieved marvelous things, but the only way he could support his family was to show rich foreign idiots around the remnants of the era when his home town was a seat of power.

In my story, the humans’ relationship to the old fortress, and to the greatness they’ve lost, and to the colonial powers that rule them, all stem from this impression.

The part about the stereogram came to me in a dream that involved a stereoscope – a Victorian-era parlor gadget with lenses that show the viewer two similar photographs at once, creating the combined effect of a single three-dimensional image. In my dream though, a different person was looking through each lens, and somehow they both understood the combined picture.  I worked backward from there to shape a relationship that would allow that to happen.

I’m proud to say my short story “Small Burdens” just went up on the wonderful speculative fiction magazine Strange Horizons.  You can read it here.

This piece began as my first Clarion story, written during the week our workshop was led by Kelly Link.

A bit of spoiler — It’s a fairy story, and I knew next to nothing about fairy lore when I started it, but the piece grew out of the question: When fairies steal human children, why do they bother to leave changelings in their place?  It seems like a lot of work, and they’re eventually found out sooner or later.  Do fairies just have cruel senses of humor, or do the changelings serve some purpose that humans never see?  I tried to answer that, working from the premise that fairies were a bit too alien to relate to humans, and that the changeling had to be doing something that would help them abduct or raise a human baby.

I’ve been a big fan of Strange Horizons for years (and it was co-founded by another one of my Clarion instructors, Mary Anne Mohanraj), so I’m delighted this story found a good home there.

So it turns out that inclusion in the Locus Recommended Reading List also means inclusion on the Locus Awards ballot.  “Home Again” is a tiny story that got only a fraction of the attention of some of the others on this long list, but it would mean a lot if it didn’t come in dead last.  If you read it in Interzone #221 and liked it, please vote!

The ballot is here, and “Home Again” is in the short story category, about halfway down the page.  You don’t need to be a subscriber or a member, and you can vote for 5 pieces in each category.  Thanks!

This is worth mentioning:  The 2009 Locus Recommended Reading List is out, and my Interzone short story “Home Again” is included in it!

I’m a little stunned to see my name appear with so many people I’m in awe of.  There are several with whom I never would have expected to share a list any more specific than “Beings That Appreciate Oxygen” –  conspicuous among these are four of my Clarion instructors: Kelly Link, James Patrick Kelly, Geoff Ryman, and Neil Gaiman.

Wow.

Once or twice a year for the last three years or so, my writing group, Altered Fluid, has visited Jim Freund’s speculative fiction-themed radio show on WBAI, Hour of the Wolf.  The topic of these shows is writing groups and how they function.

After the banter and self-introductions are out of the way, one of us reads the first draft of a new short story.  Then we conduct a regular workshopping session – we go around the room, and each member critiques the story, speaking for a carefully timed two and a half minutes.  The writer can’t respond during this time, but after everyone has had their turn, we open it into a free discussion.  After that, since this is a live radio show, we take calls from listeners.

Perhaps because the show airs from 5 to 7 A.M. on Saturday mornings, Jim has to stay on top of the calls to ensure they are on-topic.  Often they are, and we get insightful feedback.  Sometimes we get snippets of whatever’s on the mind of people who happen to already be up and about at dawn on a Saturday.  Our favorite comment was the heavily accented guy who called in after a hard-sf story about dark matter aliens and said, “I didn’t like it — It needs more trolls.”

Today was my turn at the microphone, and I think it went pretty well.  I read a sf story about three men stuck in a time machine with a sleeping dinosaur, which is not my usual stuff, but its pace and humor made it a good selection for a reading (my thoughts on stegosauruses are here.)  The feedback was kind, and where people saw faults, they had some exciting ideas I could apply towards fixing them.  They got my jokes, mostly.  And we had some great callers: one who had a full crit prepared; one who verified my references to elephants based on personal experience; and one heavily accented guy who said what I thought at the time was, “We all want to have peace in Chechen,” but which actually turned out to be, “We all want a hot beef injection.”  Good thing Jim cut him off quick, or I might have said something like, “As do we all, caller.”  (Now that I think about it, this may have been the same guy who wanted more trolls.)

Here’s the mp3 of the whole two-hour show.

WBAI is on FM 99.5 in the New York area.

I want to let the world know that Sybil’s Garage will begin accepting submissions for its 7^th issue on Friday, January 15.  This ‘zine is Matt Kressel’s baby, but I’ve been an associate editor for the last several issues, and I have to admit to feeling some pride as well for the quality of the writing it carries and for the strong reputation it’s been garnering.

Here’s some of what we’re looking for:

Sybil’s Garage publishes a wide variety of speculative fiction, including traditional science fiction, fantasy and horror as well as more atmospheric/slipstream stories. For issue no. 7 we seek to cast a wider net and encourage contributors to send us both atmospheric/slipstream stories as well as those with traditionally strong plots and characters.

We also will look at stories with little or no speculative element, but with speculative tendencies (e.g. weird but not-necessarily supernatural.)

Here’s a few things reviewers said about previous issues:

“Sybil’s Garage [is] one of the best run and downright prettiest of the small press magazines…”
- Stephen Eley, Editor, Escape Pod

“This issue, a salon of gorgeous language and music, has something for everyone and is well worth exploring for an afternoon, curled up in your favorite chair.”
- The Fix, Rae Bryant

“Sybil’s Garage is a strange little magazine with old-fashioned illustrations accompanying the text. If you like some tales out of the ordinary, then this is for you… The stories all got a Very Good from me.”
- SFRevu, Sam Tomaino

“Sybil’s Garage No. 4 is an alienating thing—a saturation tank of isolation and the sublime. Like its first three predecessors, Issue 4 aligns the quietly bizarre and the slightly uncanny with nineteenth-century design. That’s not to say that Sybil’s Garage is easily classifiable, either in form or content. Victorian woodcuts share pagespace with postmodern silhouettes and modernist sketches. Fragments of polyglottal marginalia pepper Sybil’s pages—appearing everywhere like cryptic typesetter’s notes. From the first glimpse of the Bladerunneresque cover to the final, stunning woodcut, this issue is its own work of slipstream art.”
- Behind the Wainscot, Darin Bradley

The full guidelines are here.  There’s a nifty on-line submission system, and our response time is usually just a matter of weeks.  If you’ve got speculative fiction or poetry that you’re proud of, we’d love to see it!

Alright, it’s been so long since I last updated this that the spambots have begun circling like buzzards, and it’s becoming more effort to delete their comments than to just post something new.  Hopefully when they see signs of life, they’ll move on (though if you need discount pharmaceuticals, I can put you in touch with someone who desperately wants to sell them to you).

This is kind of neat:

I recently visited the Cloisters, which is a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art way up at the very northern tip of Manhattan.  It’s home to a lot of their medieval collection, and I went mainly to stare at the Unicorn Tapestries.

This is a group of seven tapestries that were woven in the Netherlands approximately 1495-1505.  It’s not clear that they were all originally part of the same set, but they’ve been together for hundreds of years.  Each depicts one or two scenes in the hunt for a unicorn involving all the folk of a castle.  The pictures include many layers of Christian and Pagan symbolism, not all of which are still understood, and when you get within a few inches of them they reveal more detail than you can absorb in a single visit. They fascinated me when I first found them ten years ago; since then I’ve discovered the beautiful stories of Peter S. Beagle and learned that these tapestries inspired some of his best known work.

Tapestries are apparently a lot more portable and durable than paintings.  These were looted during the French Revolution, and when they were discovered generations later, they were in a barn, being used to cover potatoes.

Although many huntsmen pursue the unicorn, it eludes them until it is caught by a virgin.  The huntsmen kill it and bring it back to the castle.

In the final tapestry, the unicorn is resurrected; this is an obvious reference to Christ, but since the unicorn is now in contented captivity with a collar around its neck, it’s thought to also represent a newlywed groom.  (At least some of these were commissioned to celebrate a marriage, possibly that of Anne of Brittany to Charles VIII.)

(In this scene, those red streaks aren’t blood;  they are dripping juice from the pomegranates above it, which also represents rebirth.)

The fifth tapestry, the one in which the virgin captures the unicorn in a rose garden, was heavily damaged, and just two strips of it remain.  You can’t actually see the virgin now, and you have to guess what she might have looked like;  all that’s visible is her hand on the back of the unicorn’s neck as he gazes up at her, oblivious to the attacking dogs.  (I wonder — did someone cut her out of the piece to make a medieval pin-up?) The tarty-looking woman behind them seems to be her maid.  She’s calling one of the huntsmen, but her come-hither expression suggests she’s thinking about more than just the unicorn.

I just got a bit of nice press:  Rich Horton calls my story “Home Again” one of Interzone‘s best three short stories of 2009.   (Novellas and novelettes are separate categories, but still…)

http://ecbatan.livejournal.com/84244.html

“The best short stories were: “Home Again”, by Paul M. Berger (April), a short story with a sharp ending about a man piloting “thought-ships” across the universe while trying to maintain his family’s reality; “Unexpected Outcomes”, by Tim Pratt (June), in which a certain Tim Pratt, and the rest of the world, realize on 9/11 that the world is a simulation — and end up taking action about that; and another June story, Sarah L. Edwards’s “Lady of the White-Spired City”, about a woman in an interstellar society returning to a planet on which her long ago (due to time dilation) visit has made her the stuff of legend.”

(Thanks to Mercurio Rivera for pointing this out to me!)