REVIEW: “Being and Becoming a Writer” by Karen Lord

Review of Karen Lord, “Being and Becoming a Writer”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 13-16 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

How does one give at advice on how to write, when the ways of writing are as numerous and distinct as the writers themselves? This is the question Lord tackles in this opening piece of the anthology, and she attempts to answer it via a series of “things I wish I had known earlier” (p. 13). Her recommendations stem from the practical — learn how to schedule your time, how to meet your deadlines and keep track of your correspondence, how to negotiate — to the cautionary, reminding us of the danger of the “starving/suffering artist” (p. 14).

There isn’t anything groundbreaking in this piece, just good solid things that you may already have learned, but which it never hurts to be reminded of. My favorite recommendation is to “carve out time to keep learning”. So often I see people treat the old adage “write what you know” as a limitation — that if you don’t know something about it, you cannot/should not write about it — rather than seeing it as an opportunity: You want to write about X? Go ye thereforth and learn as much about X as you can!

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REVIEW: Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer edited by Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans

Review of Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021) — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

And now for something totally different…

We don’t review much nonfiction on this site, and when we do we choose nonfiction that has close connections with reading SF and F. This anthology, on the other hand, is about writing, and while not everything in it is about SFF specifically, that is its main focus, and all of the pieces are good advice.

This collection is basically the Clarion West Writers Workshop in written format, a series of short reflective and didactic pieces by people who’ve attended the workshop as instructors, guests, and students, providing support and encouragement for writers whatever stage they are at, whether newbie, experienced, or somewhere in between. As a writer myself who has been in something of a dry spell during most of the Covid period, reading these articles has been balm for my soul; they are like written kaffeeklatsches with people you feel you could be friends with, telling me what I need to hear in a way that allows me to hear it. What I love best is how much the pieces themselves reflect the voice and advice of the person who wrote them, showing us how to write well and not just telling.

As is usual, we will review each piece separately, and link the individual reviews back here when they’ve been published.

I’m not normally one for taking advice on how to write from other writers. But I’ll make an exception for this book, and would recommended anyone else do too, whatever stage in your writing development you’re in. I can easily see this book becoming a sort of reference/trouble-shooting text for when you’re having trouble with a particular thing.

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REVIEW: “Across From Her Dead Father in an Airport Bar” by Brian Trent

Review of Brian Trent, “Across From Her Dead Father in an Airport Bar”, Flas Fiction Online 87 (2021): Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Andrea’s father died when she was young, but left behind a legacy of himself for his daughter; we meet both her and her father 20 years later, in the titular airport bar. While parts of the story felt very much “look how different 2040 will be from 2020!” in a way that feels doomed to not date well, I enjoyed the story for the depth of emotion it was able to wring, in so short a space, from the desire to be there to see your child grow up.

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REVIEW: “Traffic Circle of Old Connecticut” by Susan Jane Bigelow

Review of Susan Jane Bigelow, “Traffic Circle of Old Connecticut”, Luna Station Quarterly 24 (2015): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Ever since the Kalo invasion, Tian has practiced forgetting — forgetting her younger sister, Asan, left with her grandmother back in the village; forgetting that she is Zaluat; forgetting that her Zaluat ancestors passed down their circle magic to her. But when her grandmother dies and Asan is put into the Training Institute, Tian can forget no longer. She attempts a daring rescue of her sister, and in their escape they both learn the truth of their ancestor’s circle power, in a very clever allusion to the title.

This was a story rich in magic, history, oppression, and strength, and was a very satisfying read.

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REVIEW: “A Funnel of Time” by Kris Faatz

Review of Kris Faatz, “A Funnel of Time”, Luna Station Quarterly 24 (2015): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Content note: Attempted suicide.

This story hops between 2005 and 1934, and the experiences of two women, otherwise entirely unconnected from each other, each undergoing electro-convulsive therapy to fix them, to make them forget. One woman is schizophrenic; the other, bi-polar. At least, that’s what the husband or the brother says, the one who committed them in the first place. Whether or not it’s true doesn’t matter, though; what matters is that somehow these two women manage to find each other and support each other, and help each other survive the abuse: “Through a funnel of time, two women hold each other up.”

This was not a typical LSQ story, and the use of real-world people in it (see note at the end of the story) was a bit off-putting for me; but I really liked the premise of women supporting women across time.

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REVIEW: “Turning Song” by Fey Karvaly

Review of Fay Karvaly, “Turning Song”, Luna Station Quarterly 24 (2015): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Content warning: Underage rape.

The Minstrel is in love with a girl who has become a tree — it’s the sort of premise that you’d expect to find in a fairy tale, and maybe this story is a fairy tale at heart, though on the surface it is something rather odder than that. I didn’t care overmuch for the Minstrel, but I found Plum’s existence fascinating (if the story of how she got there horrifying), and Miss Ursula who is old enough to call a snow-bearded minstrel “young” was equally charming. Best of all was the very satisfying revenge and comeuppance that Plum wrecked on the god that raped her as a child.

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REVIEW: “Inspector 36” by Kristin Hooker

Review of Kristin Hooker, “Inspector 36”, Luna Station Quarterly 45 (2021): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

No one really worries about the arrival of our Robot Overlords, not seriously, not in real life. What worries 21st C first-world residents is the arrival of our Robot Colleagues, the self-checkout machines, the automations that will turn the working class into the unemployed class. Hooker’s story plays on that fear, giving us a world of bots “a quarter of which, which by law, had to represent a real person receiving a real paycheck” — but even those real people aren’t necessarily doing the work themselves, most of them just rent another bot to do the work for them. Short, but sweet, this was an excellent story.

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REVIEW: “Cosmic Resolution” by Hannah Hulbert

Review of Hannah Hulbert, “Cosmic Resolution”, Luna Station Quarterly 45 (2021): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Content note: Alcoholic parent.

Thirteen year old Marina doesn’t know what’s harder to deal with — the tentacles that slurp against her bedroom window at night, or about the fact that her mother doesn’t seem to think this is anything out of the ordinary. The opening of this story is weird and creepy, but when even Marina’s mom can’t ignore the tentacles and her whole history spills out, it takes a hard, sharp shift into the deliciously amusing and touchingly poignant. I really enjoyed this!

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REVIEW: “A Test of Trouble” by Catherine George

Review of Catherine George, “A Test of Trouble”, Luna Station Quarterly 45 (2021): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

For anyone woman who has lived through parenting a newborn with an unsupportive partner, or seen a friend live through the same: This will be a hard story to read. Bree’s baby Pippa is 9 weeks old, and her entire world has changed, except for perhaps the one thing that should — she is still expected to be the smart, funny, put-together, beautiful wife who gets supper on the table every day. She’s become a mother — but Max certainly hasn’t yet become a father! (The fact that Max was Bree’s professor when they first started going out certainly doesn’t make him any more sympathetic!) In a sense, this is a horror story, one that I read the whole time hoping that Bree would find a way to get out, to escape, to get Max out of her life. I’m not sure if that’s the angle George was going for, but if it was, she nailed it. This was a deeply unsettling, vaguely disturbing story.

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REVIEW: “Maeve in the Picture” by Clare McNamee-Annett

Review of Clare McNamee-Annett, “Maeve in the Picture”, Luna Station Quarterly 45 (2021): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

I really had no idea what was going on in the early paragraphs of this story — they necessitated not one but two rereads before I could keep enough of it in my head to plunge on.

If “gritty realism” and “vampire romance” don’t conflict with each other, then those are the two phrases I would pick to describe this story. It wasn’t a happy, fluffy romance; it’s more of the uncomfortable “how close can you make a relationship sound abusive without actually being abusive” type of romance. But this was definitely unlike any other vampire story I’ve ever read.

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