Last publication for the year: notes on "The Berry Girl"


When it rains, it pours. Or something like that.

 My last story for 2014 came out this week (same week as "Congress of Dragons.") This latest one is "The Berry Girl," up at Lakeside Circus. A podcast should be coming out soon. It was released just as summer ends, which is fitting as the story is an ode to summer.
STORY NOTES (possibly mild spoilers below!)








I wrote this story last year, in the thick of summer. The new raspberry bush in our front yard was giving us its first harvest. Every day my youngest daughter checked the bush for ripe berries. It was her greatest delight to pick the berries, bringing them one or two at a time into the house in a little yellow bowl.

 One morning I was in the shower when my little girl entered the bathroom. She slid open my shower door to proudly show me her harvest--her bowl full of ripe berries. And she sang, "I am the Berry Girl! I am the Berry Girl!"

 So I sat down to write a story about a Berry Girl.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On memoir and things I have no experience of—A review of "Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life" by William Finnegan

I know nothing about surfing. I've never stood on a board. I've never even seen surfing done in real life (I've spent most of my life in the American Midwest. And even when I lived in Los Angeles for college, I somehow never met any surfers). Yet it came into my head to write a story that involved surfing. So I read a lot. I was interested in big-wave surfing, so I read Susan Casey's book, "The Wave." I read a lot of journalistic accounts. I watched videos online. And eventually, probably inevitably, I stumbled upon a two-part article in The New Yorker. The article is titled " Playing Doc's Games" by William Finnegan, and it was published in 1992. It is famous among surfers. The surf magazine The Inertia called it " possibly the greatest surf story ever" and a writer at The Surfer described it as "the best written piece (all 39,000 words of it) ever penned about surf culture."  I am not a surfer. Yet Wi...
Read more

Short fiction recs! June-July 2024

So many beautiful, strange stories I’ve read this summer so far. Here are only a few. Strange Tales of Beauty and Horror “Markets of the Otherworld” by Rati Mehrotra in Uncanny Magazine In the Market of Illusions, I writhed on the cobblestoned street that wound between the gilded stalls, gasping for air, convinced I was a goldfish. Someone dragged me to a fountain and pushed me in, breaking the spell and—a minor point, except the water was ice cold—drenching me to the skin.   In the Cat Market, I was pursued by a large white Persian and coerced into signing away a month of my life in return for the privilege of petting her. In my dreams, I still run my fingers through her thick, beautiful fur while she leans against me and hums in pleasure. Worth it, I tell myself, even as I wonder which month of life has been taken from me.   An absolutely gorgeous, magical, and at times melancholy tale of a woman traveling through the enchanting markets of other worlds. A story ...
Read more

Short fiction recs! Stories from Aug-Sept 2024

Some stories I’ve read recently.   Tales of Strangeness, Beauty, and Horror “Cicadas, and Their Skins” by Avra Margariti in Strange Horizons  I spent my first summer as an orphan watching cicadas fuck, scream, and molt. Wasn’t long before I plucked one of the cicada skins from the dry village soil. I brushed it clean against my secondhand clothes I was already beginning to outgrow. Dappled by sunlight, the carapace looked hard though I knew it to be brittle. A coat, people called it. To me it looked like a veil I yearned to slip into.   A fierce, angry, bloody tale. An orphaned girl has lost her mother and moved from the city to a small, stultifying village. Watching the cicadas, she learns that she can slip into a cicada’s skin. She can find herself in the skins of mice, birds, and more. And she can teach the other children of the village to do the same. An angry tale of wildness, of desperation and freedom, of seeking escape from the judgmental eyes of th...
Read more