chromium or dumplings
Happy New Year!
My poem "Hexavalent" is in the January/February issue of Analog (my first time in the magazine!) Here's Gennoveus modeling with my contributor's copies.
The poem was inspired by a 2022 chemical spill in the Huron river: that "lonely weekend factory" is real. Fortunately, further testing revealed that much of the chromium spilled was the safer trivalent variety. It always surprises me how often writing research turns into a chemistry lesson.
It can be tricky working out where to find the grand old print magazines, in this digital age. Of course you can always subscribe; the Analog website offers both print and digital subscriptions (keep an eye out for more of my science poetry!) A big old-fashioned newsstand is the best place to look for a single print copy; in particular, Barnes and Noble tends to have a good selection of science fiction magazines. You can buy single digital issues at Magzter. If you do snag a copy, look for Marie Vibbert's story "The Handmaiden-Alchemist" in the same issue. Marie and I were trading ideas about prose style and historical knitting technique at the Cleveland Society for Creative Anachronism fighter practice back around the turn of the present millennium. It's lovely to be reunited here (with even more facts about chemistry!)
One of my December discoveries was a kind of Georgian dumpling called khinkali. Here's a Brooklyn takeout version:
Khinkali are like a cross between ravioli and a soup dumpling. They're big, almost the size of a fist: you hold the knob and nibble on the edges to let the juice run into your mouth. I want to learn to make them. I'm also thinking about what version people might make on my imaginary planet of Nakharat. It would be western mountain food on the North Continent (that's the part of Nakharat with cultural echoes of the Caucasus mountain region). Maybe they'd go heavy on the ground coriander.
Let me end by reassuring you that, after asking Gennoveus to model, I gave him some more direct attention:
Yours,
Ursula.