I received two messages today. One, a gift. The other, a promise of a gift. The messages are unexpected and came one after the other, during that hour when my heart is blue and lonely. Now my heart is full. To the first messenger, J and I thank you. To the second, I can’t wait!
Thank you, thank you, thank you. (You know who you are.)
I don’t know what bug it was that hit us, but J and I were both quite sick from Tuesday onwards so the weekend just passed us by.
I am a full bag of worries nowadays. The flood back home, my siblings’ financial needs, the total cost of flood damage, J’s coding ticket and unclaimed license, his difficulties at the job market, my own uncertainties. Money problems, life problems. It keeps you up at night.
I’ll be 25 in less than a month. J and I will turn two in about a week. I wonder if I’ll be able to celebrate, with the miserable flood, and my miserable bank account.
I need something beautiful to look forward to, is all.
Here’s a note from anthology editor, Rose Lemberg:
I’m very proud of this. Putting this book together has been quite a journey. I cannot begin to tell you how much I love these poems. You can get a glimpse from the ToC as to how diverse the contents/contributors are, but you cannot truly see it just from the ToC, but trust me: this is both tremendous and diverse.
And I couldn’t have done this alone. Thank you so much to everyone who gave advice and held my hand through this process (I’m looking at you, Team Stone Telling!). Special thanks to Sonya Taaffe for suggesting poems, and Shweta Narayan, Jennifer Smith, and Sharon Mock for help w. ordering the ToC. And of course, many thanks to the contributors.
Congratulations to everyone!
People who want to know about preordering: not yet, but I will let you know as soon as I can.
And here’s the TOC!
The Moment of Change: An Anthology of Feminist Speculative Poetry
Rose Lemberg. Introduction.
POETRY:
Ursula K. Le Guin, Werewomen
Nicole Kornher-Stace, Harvest Season
Eliza Victoria, Prayer
Shweta Narayan, Cave-smell
Theodora Goss, The Witch
Amal El-Mohtar, On the Division of Labour
J.C. Runolfson, The Birth of Science Fiction
Kristine Ong Muslim, Resurrection of a Pin Doll
Lawrence Schimel, Kristallnacht
Cassandra Phillips-Sears, The Last Yangtze River Dolphin
Peg Duthie, The Stepsister
Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl with Two Skins
Theodora Goss, Binnorie
Nandini Dhar, Learning to Locate Colors in Grey: Kiran Talks About Her Brothers
Rachel Manija Brown, River of Silk
JoSelle Vanderhooft, The King’s Daughters
Lisa Bradley, The Haunted Girl
Mary Alexandra Agner, Tertiary
Sara Amis, Owling
Athena Andreadis, Spacetime Geodesics
Lisa Bradley, In Defiance Of Sleek-Armed androids
Sofía Rhei, Cinderella
Alex Dally MacFarlane, Beautifully Mutilated, Instantly Antiquated
Shweta Narayan, Epiphyte
Elizabeth R. McClellan, Down Cycles
H.E.L Gurney, She Was
Kelly Pflug-Back, My Bones’ Cracked Abacus
Kat Dixon, Nucleometry
N. A’Yara Stein, It’s All In The Translation
Sally Rosen Kindred, Sabrina, Borne
Adrienne J. Odasso, The Hyacinth Girl
Delia Sherman, Snow White to the Prince
Phyllis Gotlieb, The Robot’s Daughter
Vandana Singh, Syllables of Old Lore
Greer Gilman, She Undoes
Emily Jiang, Self-Portrait
Ki Russel, The Antlered Woman Responds
Catherynne M. Valente, The Oracle at Miami
Athena Andreadis, Night Patrol
Koel Mukherjee, Sita Reflects
Lorraine Schoen, Hypatia/Divided
Sharon Mock, Machine Dancer
C.W. Johnson, Towards a Feminist Algebra
Jo Walton, Blood Poem IV
Meena Kandasamy, Six Hours of Chastity
Samantha Henderson, Berry Cobbler
Sofía Rhei, Bluebeard Possibilities
Sheree Renee Thomas, Old Scratch poem featuring River
Elizabeth R. McClellan, The Sea Witch Talks Show Business
Ranjani Murali, Chants for Type: Skull-Cap Donner at Center-One Mall
Sonya Taaffe, Madonna of the Cave
Jeannelle Ferreira, Anniversaries
Rebecca Korvo, Handwork
Patricia Monaghan, Journey To The Mountains Of The Hag
Ari Berk, Pazerik Burial on the Ukok Plateau
Neile Graham, Dsonoqua Daughters
Sonya Taaffe, Matlacihuatl’s Gift
Ellen Wehle, Once I No Longer Lived Here
Yoon Ha Lee, Art Lessons
JT Stewart, Say My Name
Amal El-Mohtar, Pieces
Sofia Samatar, The Year of Disasters
C. S. E. Cooney, The Last Crone on the Moon
Minal Hajratwala, Archaeology of the Present
Jennifer McGowan, Mara Speaks
JT Stewart, Ceremony
April Grant, Trenchcoat
Tara Barnett, Star Reservation
Mary Alexandra Agner, Old Enough
Nisi Shawl, Transbluency: An Antiprojection Chant
My sincere thanks to Rose for including my poem here. Can’t wait to get my copy!
6 Luzon dams release water, worsen floods
Calumpit floods worst in 40 years
Floods swamp Bulacan as dams release water
I called my mother yesterday and she said the Hagonoy town market (including our store, and most of our goods for sale) is now underwater. Water inside the house now reaches her neck, and the water outside can completely submerge a person. My parents and my lola still have food and drinking water, but there’s still no electricity and running water’s scarce. They can’t leave the house. Prayers, please. :(
Really bad storm yesterday. J and I were in his parked car around lunch and we felt the car rock as the wind slammed against us. Didn’t go to work, couldn’t. (Office work was suspended anyway, but I heard some office mates had continued with their shoots like a bunch of crazy people.) No electricity. Cell phone dying by midday. Back in Bulacan, my parents had to deal with the chest-high flood outside the house and the waist-high water inside and the fact that our refrigerator was submerged. I could replace the refrigerator, but I heard the frustration and the exhaustion made my father cry and that really broke my heart. So fuck you, Pedring. Fuck you very much.
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But today’s another day. (My parents said pretty much the same thing.) So yes – I have a poem in the fifth volume of Stone Telling called “Prayer“. Read and share, if you are so inclined. Lots of fantastic authors here.
And I’ve been reading a lot of comics lately! I’ve finished two memoirs. In Pyongyang, Guy Delisle talks about his stay in the North Korean capital with equal snark and sadness. For such a dark topic, Delisle actually manages to keep the tone light till the last page. There is a degree of outrage, but it is dampened with humor. I guess it’s a defense mechanism – if he allowed himself to be affected by the apparent brainwashing and injustice going on around him, he’d go insane. (Hell, I would.) Or end up dead. (He did bring a copy of Orwell’s 1984 to his hotel, and even had the audacity to lend it to his North Korean guide. Ha!)
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is a brave introspection of her relationship with her father, his life and his death, and how his secrets had affected her family. And oh, what beautiful, vivid language to go with the art!
Some (ongoing) series that I would recommend:
Chew – Set in a post-bird flu world, where chicken and other bird meat are declared illegal, and the Food and Drug Administration is kick-ass and the Department of Agriculture has sexy covert operatives. (I know, right?!) Tony Chu, a police officer, gets hired by the FDA after a chicken buy-bust operation. He is a cibopath, a person who gets information about the origins and circumstances of everything he eats. (Except beets. He gets nothing from beets.) He uses this ability to solve crimes, so yeah, sometimes he has to eat a severed limb. Or worse.
The Unwritten – A story about stories! That is all I’m going to say! Very engrossing.
Runaways – Set in a world where superheroes and villains are a regular occurrence. (Especially New York.) A group of teenagers discover that their parents are members of a crime ring called The Pride. I think the quality is inconsistent – the series kept changing writers and illustrators – but I guess I’ll keep reading. I’ve heard this series is on hiatus.
Bone – Premium kids’ literature right here. Funny and exciting and I can’t wait to read the entire series.
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How much does a good refrigerator go for these days?
Sept. 17th, Christian’s birthday, and off we went to Marikina, to the Riverbank Grille, for crispy pata and beer and possible heart complications. It happened to be SM Marikina’s 3-Day Sale so Marcos Highway felt more like the Marcos Parking Lot for a while. J and I got there just in time for dinner. I really loved the crispy pata.
Happy birthday, Christian!
Thanks to Tope (who is not in any of these pictures) for the pictures!
Eliza Victoria 
