Before the Dust Settles

Well, it’s finally a reality!

During the second half of 2007, I took a creative writing unit as part of my degree at Murdoch University. The unit was designed to allow students to work on and develop one 6000-word piece over the course of the semester. However, unlike previous creative writing units, this one didn’t allow for a reading of each student’s completed work. We were only privy to extracts as they were workshopped over the course of the semester. As such, it was suggested that we somehow publish our work—for ourselves—so that everyone had an opportunity to read everyone else’s finished pieces. I volunteered to compile this humble anthology, which at the beginning was merely going to be spiral-bound photocopies done on the cheap. Concurrently, I’d been reading Jeff VanderMeer’s very interesting essay on the publishing history of City of Saints and Madman, which was where I first came across the term POD, or Print-On-Demand publishing—a digital printing process which allows for cheap reproduction, making it financially feasible for small runs like ours (30-odd copies). So I put it to the group that we pursue this avenue, making our anthology as professional-looking as possible, which increased my workload since I was now compiling and designing and editing—all for the first time in my life. In keeping with the nature of the anthology, it was title Before the Dust Settles, representing our first foray into published writing, and was ostensibly published by Liminal Press... hopefully my fellow classmates will get the (admittedly not very funny) gag.

Today, I received the proof copy (many thanks to Cory @ Digital Print Australia for putting up with such a newbie), and it looks fantastic. Our cover art is a fantastic line drawing by Petri Ivalo Sinda, a fellow classmate who also has his story included. The full contents is:

Introduction – Peta Mulcahy
Peta was our tutor and an experienced writer and editor in her own right. She expected the best from each of us, and wouldn’t let anyone settle for second rate writing.

Of Life and Death – Lesley Ward
A story with a social conscience and distinct local flavour. Lesley doesn’t mind telling it like it is, but does it artistically and with an economy of language that I envy. A young man’s experience of life and death in the vibrant world of Fremantle.

Saving Eyes – Michelle Tan
Michelle writes with a kind of simplicity that draws the reader in its warmth and heart. Saving Eyes is not a sentimental story by any means; rather, it makes its point gently and carefully. It is about a young woman’s last day in an anonymous city, and what it means to find yourself.

I Slipped Away – Seth Merlo
My own story is the only real fantastic piece in this anthology. It was also an opportunity to work through my own feelings regarding my father’s unexpected death. A dying man has an opportunity to see his father one last time.

Circles – Rachel French
Rachel’s contribution is a collection of poetry about the cycles of life and death as she sees them played out in her local context, allowing her to tackle a range of issues including the murder of Sofia Rodriguez-Urrutia-Shu in 2006.

Satisfaction – Penny Morgan
Penny’s story focuses on a cast of middle-aged couples and the interplay and sexual politics between them. She writes with a wonderfully controlled prose reminiscent of Virginia Woolf (who I understand Penny is heavily influenced by).

Chessday – Bernard Booth
This pseudo-science fictional piece zips along at an incredible pace thanks to Bernard’s rapid-fire and witty dialogue. A physics professor decides to get rid of the verb to be from his internal lexicon, with disastrous consequences. It also raises the question of how physics as a discipline might be advanced when it takes a lifetime to learn all the basics.

Love and Other Agnosias – Petri Ivalo Sinda
Petri has already had stories and artwork published in the likes of Eidolon and Daikaiju and is pursuing a creative writing Honours degree. His story here displays his penchant for experimenting with technique and language without sacrificing a good story. A man with a strange medical condition manages to find love and fulfillment.

Flowers for the Queen – Pearl Sumner
An autobiographical piece that chronicles an incident in Pearl’s childhood. Pearl is blind, and this gives her writing an incredible aural sense that the rest of us simply couldn’t achieve—while we tend to focus on the visual and struggle with the aural (if we attempt to deal with it at all), Pearl pins sounds down to the page as if she plucked them out of the air. Her story is poignant and representative of the kind of society we had at the time.

It’s a diverse collection, which is as it should be, given the unit ostensibly caters to all types, though I struggled against the program’s general dislike for speculative fiction and was told on one occasion that my talent was wasted on Fantasy. If I have any talent at all, I think the greater crime would be in not using it, in not writing at all, and I find it rather disparaging to claim that the fantastic offers ‘real’ writers no genuine opportunities to flex their creative and intellectual muscles. At any rate, this anthology represents an opportunity for me personally to have a go at editing and publishing, an activity that has fascinated me for a while and which I wouldn't mind moving into as a potential career. Already, there's things I'd do differently next time around, but everyone has to start somewhere I suppose.

City of Saints and Madmen

I’m utterly in love with this book. I’d read plenty of reviews and interviews with Jeff VanderMeer before finally picking up a copy of the Bantam trade edition, so I was reading with considerably high expectations. Fortunately, VanderMeer didn’t disappoint.

I think the key to understanding and enjoying City of Saints is to not ever, at any stage, to think of the book as an anthology linked by the city of Ambergris. This is not simply a collection of linked stories, but rather a novel of versions. You are reading a novel, but one whose component parts have been separated for closer inspection. Reading ‘The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris’ is like getting all the background filler material in a standard novel, only that here it’s delivered as a pseudo-history, complete with footnotes. The other three novellas that comprise the book’s first half are magnificently strange, each with a unique flavour, with ‘The Strange Case of X’ being so overwhelmingly self-conscious (where does the writer end and the character begin?) that it ends before you feel it’s begun, so caught up are you in trying to unravel what’s fiction and what reality.

Don’t mistake it for yet another dull attempt at surrealism though. Surrealism works because it subverts or abstracts a shared notion of our ‘normal’ reality – a kind of acute slippage between the audience and the artist. Yet reading City of Saints is, in many ways, like reading Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books – there’s nothing supernatural or terribly fantastic about the city of Ambergris, only that it’s very strange and it’s reality, as C.N. Manlove said about Peake’s work, has no connection with our sphere of possibility.[1]

The Appendix picks up where ‘The Strange Case of X’ leaves off. It is purported to be a collection of personal effects found in X’s cell at the Voss Bender Memorial Mental Institute. Again, since they are all so intertwined and referential to each other, these need to be read in their entirety to enjoy the full effect. Personal highlights from the Appendix include ‘The Cage,’ with its very scary ending that would make an excellent M. Night Shayamalan-style suspense thriller, ‘In the Hours After Death,’ with its strangely bittersweet account of what happens after death, ‘The Exchange,’ which is just strange (I love how this is actually set during the usual riots associated with the Festival of the Freshwater Squid, but this old couple is calmly enjoying dinner and), and ‘Learning to Leave the Flesh,’ the struggle of finding the right words to express a death, to capture something about the essence of a person’s life, moved me very deeply, having attempted a similar exercise recently in regards to a passing in my own family. Expressing such loss creatively, especially if it is a close to home, is extremely difficult, and VanderMeer approaches the task in such a way that the self-consciousness of the piece becomes an expression of his own struggle to find the right words – we can sense the author at work.

I haven’t seen the hardcover edition, but as I understand it the Bantam edition (pictured above) contains the same material. I’m not super-amazed at the interior layout though – sometimes the text looks too squished on the page, as if it needed more space. I don’t know how it appears in the hardcover, but I know its has larger dimensions so I imagine it is much better laid out. The hardcover art is much more striking as well, and I’ll be tracking down a copy as soon as some spare $$ miraculously find their way into my wallet.

A highly recommended book, and one that should also prove that fantasy literature needn’t be all about hobbits and elves, nor about too-strange an events or characters that the reader can’t engage with.

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[1] C.N. Manlove. ‘On the Nature of Fantasy’ in Schlobin, Roger C. (ed) The Aesthetics of Fantasy Literature and Art (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press and The Harvester Press), 1982. p. 18