New story out today! Read "A Land of Saints and Monsters" in Beneath Ceaseless Skies
Good morning! I come bearing good news and a small surprise: a short story publication!
In my last newsletter, I shared a short list of forthcoming publications. The following day, I heard from the editor of the magazine Beneath Ceaseless Skies that my story, which I thought would be out late in the fall, was now scheduled for July.
"A Land of Saints and Monsters" is out today!
This story is based on the fourteenth-century Turkish epic Danişmendname (The Legend of King Danishmend... it hurts my wee historian's soul to link you to Wikipedia, but there are so few quick, non-paywalled reads in English!), which is the subject of my PhD dissertation-in-progress. In a way, Danişmendname is historical fiction: though the surviving redaction dates to the first half of the 1300s, it tells the story of a king and his band of loyal warriors who conquered parts of Anatolia in the late 11th century (though it plays very fast and loose with historical realities, including fighting Crusaders as well as Byzantine, Armenian, and Georgian bad guys).
I've had this idea since I finished my MA thesis, which compared female warriors in two examples of Old Anatolian Turkish popular literature, in 2017. One of the main characters in Danişmendname is a warrior named Efromiya. She is the daughter of the Byzantine ruler of Amasya who falls in love with a warrior named Artuhı. Her father forbids them from being together, so Efromiya chooses to run away to be with Artuhı. She converts to Islam because she has a dream about the Prophet (a common trope) and becomes one of the king's right hand men, so to speak, as they conquer Rûm (Rome, aka Anatolia).
Efromiya is a fascinating figure. She is not quite the "Amazon" some scholars would have you believe she is, but she definitely kicks some serious ass in battle. She leads recon missions to rescue Artuhı when he gets taken prisoner and rescues herself from danger regularly. She rides hard and fast, wields a badass mace, and gets compared to the legendary Persian hero Rostam in the midst of battle. I knew when I was writing my MA thesis about warrior women that I simply had to write a story about her.
It took me *checks notes* three and a half years to try and get it down to short story size. Turns out the story needed the same hearty dose of historical inaccuracy as my source material.
...by which I mean I added magic and vampires. Really monstrous, wild vampires.
The idea struck me as I was walking across campus to the Oriental Institute to study. I whipped out my phone and started texting my sisters ("what if... my dissertation... but with VAMPIRES?!") and was so absorbed with the idea that I nearly got hit by a (very slow-moving) car. Oops!
(Seems frightening, but that's actually a fairly common occurrence on at the University of Chicago. Grateful to all the patient drivers who brake as we grad students wander, heads in the clouds, across the few streets that intersect campus.)
Writing this story really got me through the worst of some grueling translations of the original text last July. I'm so happy to finally share it with you all! And who knows--maybe this idea might still become a novel anyway ;)
I hope you enjoy reading "A Land of Saints and Monsters"!
If you do, it would mean the world to me if you could take a second to tweet about the story and share it with more readers. It's really tough to get eyes on short stories online, and word of mouth really travels farther than you think! Thank you so much!
Catch you later!
xx
In my last newsletter, I shared a short list of forthcoming publications. The following day, I heard from the editor of the magazine Beneath Ceaseless Skies that my story, which I thought would be out late in the fall, was now scheduled for July.
"A Land of Saints and Monsters" is out today!
This story is based on the fourteenth-century Turkish epic Danişmendname (The Legend of King Danishmend... it hurts my wee historian's soul to link you to Wikipedia, but there are so few quick, non-paywalled reads in English!), which is the subject of my PhD dissertation-in-progress. In a way, Danişmendname is historical fiction: though the surviving redaction dates to the first half of the 1300s, it tells the story of a king and his band of loyal warriors who conquered parts of Anatolia in the late 11th century (though it plays very fast and loose with historical realities, including fighting Crusaders as well as Byzantine, Armenian, and Georgian bad guys).
I've had this idea since I finished my MA thesis, which compared female warriors in two examples of Old Anatolian Turkish popular literature, in 2017. One of the main characters in Danişmendname is a warrior named Efromiya. She is the daughter of the Byzantine ruler of Amasya who falls in love with a warrior named Artuhı. Her father forbids them from being together, so Efromiya chooses to run away to be with Artuhı. She converts to Islam because she has a dream about the Prophet (a common trope) and becomes one of the king's right hand men, so to speak, as they conquer Rûm (Rome, aka Anatolia).
Efromiya is a fascinating figure. She is not quite the "Amazon" some scholars would have you believe she is, but she definitely kicks some serious ass in battle. She leads recon missions to rescue Artuhı when he gets taken prisoner and rescues herself from danger regularly. She rides hard and fast, wields a badass mace, and gets compared to the legendary Persian hero Rostam in the midst of battle. I knew when I was writing my MA thesis about warrior women that I simply had to write a story about her.
It took me *checks notes* three and a half years to try and get it down to short story size. Turns out the story needed the same hearty dose of historical inaccuracy as my source material.
...by which I mean I added magic and vampires. Really monstrous, wild vampires.
The idea struck me as I was walking across campus to the Oriental Institute to study. I whipped out my phone and started texting my sisters ("what if... my dissertation... but with VAMPIRES?!") and was so absorbed with the idea that I nearly got hit by a (very slow-moving) car. Oops!
(Seems frightening, but that's actually a fairly common occurrence on at the University of Chicago. Grateful to all the patient drivers who brake as we grad students wander, heads in the clouds, across the few streets that intersect campus.)
Writing this story really got me through the worst of some grueling translations of the original text last July. I'm so happy to finally share it with you all! And who knows--maybe this idea might still become a novel anyway ;)
I hope you enjoy reading "A Land of Saints and Monsters"!
If you do, it would mean the world to me if you could take a second to tweet about the story and share it with more readers. It's really tough to get eyes on short stories online, and word of mouth really travels farther than you think! Thank you so much!
Catch you later!
xx
Don't miss what's next. Subscribe to madrugada missives 💌 with Isabel Cañas: