Small Batch Famous Authors
This one is about small-batch famous authors and how great they are.
How convenient for me to have queued this newsletter about authors and have actually finished compiling my favourite pieces from Storytelling Collective's Flash Fiction February. The collection of ten stories (a whopping 6k+ words) is available for a dollar over on my Itch.io.
There are the authors and inspirational speakers and yo-yo teams that go to basically all schools all over. Even if they're not the same guy, they're basically the same people--grade school memories of watching them talk is something most folks have. But, depending on where you are, you also have the speakers who are local (or were local) and they're unique to the particular biome of where you grew up. The thing is, you don't know that when you're seven so you think, for years, that everybody knows a fact about a thing unique to your hometown or has read a book by a person who is not actually widely known at all.
And, even with the internet now, going to fact check these multiple-decade memories is a trial. Like, yes, I remember the lady who wrote picture books about her miniature potbelly pigs? I remember us all trooping into the (carpeted!) gym of the primary school and learning about pigs and listening to her read a story. I want to think we saw a pig but I believe we absolutely did not. I'm pretty good at searching for things online but the closest I've found is Pig Tales The Adventures of Arnold, the Chinese Potbelly Miniature Pig, which might be it, actually! The date and style kind of lines up, and the pure unavailability of it anywhere also aligns with an author or illustrator who would happily come to an ex-logging town that scattered its children across multiple K-8 and primary/elementary schools.
The one that threw me the most was Dragon's Milk and The Dragon Chronicles by Susan Fletcher. I really did go well into my late 20s, if not early 30s, assuming everyone had read these books. They've got a girl who can communicate with dragons thanks to the bond formed by them saving her from a fever as a child, she's a simple farm girl who saves the dragons from dragonslayers, the biology is a little weird, like--this is classic YA fantasy stuff. It feels like something everyone would know. And yet, when I mentioned them to a coworker who had also grown up around the same farm valley I had, she'd never heard of them.
Luckily for these books, the title was memorable and I was able to track down copies to read eventually. They're still good! They remain books about protagonists who are special or perhaps chosen, yet do not find their path easily laid out to be trod by trope. There's clearly a lot of research done about animal behaviour and historical human society that rounds out the world. Even if the descriptions for the later books have the wrong metadata entries on basically every shopping site, they're still out there and hopefully being found by little weirdos who love dragons. It also turns out Fletcher wrote a new book in the series in 2010, some fourteen years after the last in the original trilogy.
I dunno, there's just something kind of neat about all of it, these small-batch famous authors. They're folks who are able to come by a school to talk to kids because they live nearby, or their family does. I follow enough authors who do tours and trips to know the whole thing is a weird and often stressful endeavour, so I can imagine that the ease of some sort of familiarity helps. And really, there are few folks who everybody knows, or at least everybody who gets the same book fair catalogues and recommended reading lists. So these local folks, they get to be basically canon for a cohort of children who years later will be like, "wait, doesn't everybody know them?"
I suppose that is true of all regional things. Like obviously rubbing alcohol is the easiest way to remove pine sap from something, if you grew up in a place where pine sap ended up on everything. Someone I knew who was from Hawai'i had never seen squirrels before and when telling me about how wonderful she found them sighed, "all we have are dolphins."
It's that "lucky 10,000" thing from xkcd I guess, there are always new things to discover or to realise could be shared with others.
I've already recommended a book here (if you like dragon stuff or viking-adjacent eras, Dragon's Milk is worth a go), but here, lets see some other obvious classics that aren't actually that at all. Because of this they're hard to find to link, but I think they're all worth looking around for.
City by Clifford D. Simak - This is a fix-up novel (one book made from a group of short stories tied together that might not have been related originally) about dogs and humans and humanity and it feels like it should be some sort of canon but it's terribly hard to find copies, so I've linked here to the Libby entry in case your library has access to the ebook.
Icerigger by Alan Dean Foster, although Nor Crystal Tears is maybe more of a classic, I've yet to encounter anything quite like the world of Icerigger, with its bat-like ice skating populace, a mild-mannered schoolteacher who should have been a wizard, a fat heiress who finds love and is allowed to be sharp tongued, a businessman loser, and a man refusing to age out of his brawling days. Like all of Foster's work, there is a clear fondness and awareness of science and biology that creates a satisfying and consistent internal logic to his worlds. Icerigger is from 1974 (and Nor Crystal Tears is from 1982, plus has insectoid people in it, btw), so there is a metre and tone to the sci-fi some might not like. Even so, it's an adventure romp and has the energy of a heroic ballad at times.
Amy's Eyes by Richard Kennedy was read to my third-grade class by our teacher and why she picked this wild-ass book that at times reads like a children's version of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen with Pippi Longstocking tendencies, I will never know. There's numerology! Dolls are brought to life by love and stabbing them in the eye with a needle! It's weird and strange so actually, a great choice for gentle third-grade teachers to read aloud in he vein of The Wizard of Oz and The Wind In The Willows.
Have some landscapes.
[ID: A photograph of a dune or desert field, studded with tall, faded yellow tufts of grass, all bending to the right in the wind. Some stalks pass in front of the lens and are out of focus. Various foot and tire trails thread between the grass. In the background, softened by mist, is a dark line of evergreen trees. End ID]
[ID: A photograph of dusty-green dry hills bisected by a two lane road with a guard rail on the left and a bike or pull-off lane to the right. The hills are broken up intermittently by dark green bushes and stunted trees as they roll into the background and merge with foothills and blue mountains. The upper half of the image is a blue sky with soft puffy clouds in a cartoonish white. The clouds cast a shadow on the hills below, demarcating the lower third of the image to shadow while the rest lies in clear bright sun. End ID]
[ID: A photograph of chaparral scrubland, a mix of deep yellow dried stalks of plants, some topped by rusty seed pots in the foreground. In the midground, tucked among the scrub, are small boulders shining almost white in the strong sun, healthy green bushes framing the image on the left and right. In the far background, a mountain range that has the pleats and texture of draped fabric is a hazy golden brown. The sky is blown-out blue, with ribbons of cloud winding across it. End ID]
And now, some links.
- Sacred Cows: Death and Squalor on the Rio Grande by A.S. Diev, ah nothing like opening a story with a little world-building setup. Like how fun is it to be like, this story is a reprint from an old issue of a magazine? I'm a sucker for it. But also flying cows, gonzo reporting, the terrors of capitalism and the ol' could vs. should argument of science.
- Scents & Semiosis by Sam Kabo Ashwell, a game that is more of a vignetted experience, "A perfumer keeps a private collection of scents, each tied to a memory. Decide what they mean." Free and about ten minutes a play, it's dreamy and strange and was a 2021 Nebula Award finalist for Best Game Writing.
- Using museum technology to look inside a pair of 18th century shoes, by Danielle Connolly, just a neat peek into textile conservation and also a literal peek into the construction of a pair of shoes. The post says it's part one of two, but I've yet to find the second half. However, National Museums Scotland's blog is great and their conservation tag has loads more interesting stories.
- Laskey Wilshire Slides from LA Public Library, a six minute video sharing slides from their photo collection that were taken as part of a late-1970s project. Links in the description lead to the slides on their online archive as well as a collected book of the images.
Did you know that there's actually a notable amount of Salvadorans that are also of Palestinian descent? Anyway, I'm donating eSims when I can, this guide was very helpful, though there are also more traditional donation targets like the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, UNRWA, and Doctors Without Borders.