Two more for October
Dear friends,
Two new stories for you this month, with more coming at a pace that startles even me!
First up we have The Music Must Always Play, published in Clarkesworld magazine. I have so many things I could say about this story--it would fill a whole newsletter. I could talk about how it draws a little, gently, on my experience of disaster in the Minnesota River Valley, or how I was thinking about the dual meaning of "alien" in contemporary discourse when I made my two major characters the children of immigrants to Minnesota.
But first and foremost in my mind is the title. It's from W.H. Auden's September 1, 1939, which you can read in its entirety here if you want. I love Auden. He's one of my absolute favorite poets. And he was staring down some pretty catastrophic things there, and he managed to write the line for which he is quoted most: "We must love one another or die." What a radical investment in hope and love at such a time, and in the face of such a dark view of humanity and its capabilities! I wrote The Music Must Always Play trying to draw out my sense of loving one another not just in the face of death but in the teeth of death--our human love as the only weapon we have against nightfall.
That's not the whole story about Auden and this poem, though. No. As he got older, he got more cynical--who could blame him, seeing what he saw in the years that followed the poem's title date--and he tried to revise that line into "We must love one another and die." Also true. Absolutely true. But, I think, less brave, less revelatory. "We must love one another or die" places a meaning on the way we care for each other on this earth, gives it power. "We must love one another and die" is...fatalism. It's a fatalism he didn't have when he wrote the poem and leaned into later. And I thought of that, too, as I was writing this story, and how to steer clear of it even in the face of the very worst that the world has to offer.
You'd think that would be enough for one month, right? Whew. Aliens and WH Auden, that's how I roll but sometimes how I roll is a lot. But publishing has its own rhythms, and so you also get another story to read: The Wrong Time Travel Story in Uncanny. I think we often place the centers of our universes in weird and unjustifiable places--this is important, not that; here is where I can learn an important lesson, not there. Very little time travel fiction goes off the beaten path of history, because we don't like to think of ourselves as off the beaten path of history--and of course because there's more to explain if you can't just say "D-Day" or "the Battle of Gettysburg" or something else well-known, if what you're doing is about Changing History. Well, that's not what I'm doing this time, so I get to send my character down one of history's back roads. And you get to go along with! Lucky you.
I've been spending plenty of time in the kitchen lately, but it's generally been harvest season processing rather than trying new recipes. I think I finished the last of that yesterday with the latest batch of roasted tomatillo goop I made and froze. I could be wrong--I keep being surprised at the tenacity of our green bean plants--but I think I've just come to the end of this year's cycle of sauces and soups. The freezer hopes I have. Ideally this will give me more time to think of new things to cook next month, but in the meantime I'm very glad to have some of the old things squirreled away until next year.
Hang in there, friends. There is delightfully more to come.
Excelsior,
Marissa