by Mike Allen
GEMMA: Coming from a film criticism/film history background, I’ve always wanted to tell a story revolving around that Holy Grail of cinematic urban legends, a haunted film. I’d also covered a lot of Toronto’s experimental scene over the years, and wanted to work that stuff in as well, to give it added cultural oomph—thus the idea of the Internet-driven exquisite cadaver project. Add characters, and things fell together fairly quickly.
STEVE: I came in about halfway through the process to help organize the background and fill out the technical side of things. One aspect I really glommed on to was the chance to prove wrong the old canard that clinical, expository writing can’t be scary. My own background is straight out of the old school of world-building, rules-logical SF&F, with a large side-order of professional business writing; I’ve always loved the craft required for good exposition, and the idea of describing something utterly horrible in as detached and clinical a way as possible was a terrific challenge.
GEMMA: Oddly, the oldest part of the story itself is probably the wrap-around, which sprang fully-formed into my head a good three years before I ever figured out what it should end up being attached to. But here’s facts: Without Steve, the rest of this story probably wouldn’t’ve come to fruition at all—not as quickly, at any rate, or by the specified deadline, either. Like Background Man and his image-drunk initial enabler, I couldn’t’ve done it without him.
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Kelly Barnhill’s work has appeared in journals such as Postscripts, Weird Tales, Underground Voices, Space and Time, and The Sun. Her first novel was recently purchased by Little, Brown and is due to be released in the spring of 2010. She has received grants and awards from Intermedia Arts, The Loft, and the Jerome Foundation. She also writes funny nonfiction books for children—a job that allows her to be nosy and curious, to think like a fourth grade boy, and to assemble amalgamations of weird, creepy and disgusting facts for a living. It is, she feels, the Greatest Job in America. She lives in Minneapolis with her three evil-genius children, her astonishingly handsome husband and her emotionally unstable dog.
And on the writing of “Open the Door and the Light Pours Through,” she says: “This story grew in fits and starts, arising from free-written sketches in different notebooks, for different purposes. I didn’t even realize that I was writing about linked characters until I had nearly enough material to weave into a semi-coherent story. This actually happens quite a bit with me. Stories, I’ve found, have their own intelligence and sense of purpose. They are wily and full of tricks, and my own plans, alas, end up being rather meaningless.
“I can, however, tell you what I was thinking about at the time: My husband’s grandmother was a war bride, originally from Southport. She met an American on leave, and they married soon after. And then he left on some of the most dangerous missions in the war. During that time, she wrote to him every day, knowing full well that it was unlikely that he’d see any of them. Knowing as well, that it was more than likely that she’d never see him again. When I wrote this story, I was thinking about their early courtship, and how a letter can be to someone and no one at the same time, as well as her American husband (my husband’s grandfather) at the end of his life, in the grips of severe dementia and confusion, the elements of himself slowly unraveling. That kind of dissolution of the Self is something that fascinates and haunts me—and then works its way into fiction, in this case, with letter-writing ghosts. Because really, what else is a ghost going to do with her time?”
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Barbara Krasnoff’s short fiction has appeared (or will soon appear) in a variety of magazines, including Space and Time, Electric Velocipede, Doorways, Sybil’s Garage, Behind the Wainscot, Escape Velocity, Weird Tales, Descant, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and Amazing Stories. Her work can also be found in the anthologies Subversion: Science Fiction & Fantasy tales of challenging the norm, Such A Pretty Face: Tales of Power & Abundance, and Memories and Visions: Women’s Fantasy & Science Fiction.
Barbara is also the author of a non-fiction book for young adults, Robots: Reel to Real, and is currently Features & Reviews Editor for Computerworld. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her partner Jim Freund and lots of toy penguins. Her Web site can be found at brooklynwriter.com.
She confides when explaining “Rosemary, That’s For Remembrance” that “Kay’s is real. It is an old neighborhood hair salon where local women, most of them elderly, come to have their hair cut, colored and permed by middle-aged beauticians who chat with them about their husbands, their grown children, their health, and their problems with the world. Some of these women are still strong, sharp, and feisty, but others have become slow, bewildered, and ill, depending on walkers and the kindness of strangers. You can’t help but wonder what happened to the people they once were.”
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Steve Rasnic Tem has new and forthcoming short stories in Black Static, Asimov’s, Interzone, and in the anthologies Phantom and Polyphony. Invisible, an audio collection of some of his newer stories, is scheduled for release by Speaking Volumes. In November Centipede Press will be publishing In Concert, a collection of all his short story collaborations with wife Melanie Tem. In 2008 Wizards Discoveries published The Man on the Ceiling, a reimagining and expansion of their award-winning novella.
Asked for notes on “When We Moved On,” he explains: “My favorite stories both to read and to write these days tend to be the ones that explore the magic of the everyday. They often have this deceptively simple, inevitable quality about them, and I find that when I myself am writing one, when they’re ready to write, they come about as if I were recounting a story told to me a long time ago. It’s that ‘when they’re ready to write’ that’s the difficult part. You can’t schedule them—at least I can’t. They usually come out of ideas I’ve been meditating on for a very long time. Oftentimes these stories take years to arrive.
“Some seemingly ordinary events in the life of a family have almost mythic significance for those who have gone through them. They shake us to our foundation. They make us children again. Events such as a road trip, a birth, a death, a move.”
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Mike Allen prefers to have fun writing confusing and bizarre introductions and bury the vague raisons d’etre for the Clockwork Phoenix series in the back where only the most dedicated bookworms will find them. He has said when asked that “the idea’s to find stories that combine compelling, offbeat tales with beautiful and unusual storytelling, stories that both experiment and entertain. For certain, some stories are more unusual than beautiful and vise versa” (Enter the Octopus, 9/29/08). He’s also said, “I’ve begun to find the traditional competently-plotted-story-competently-told to be a bit of a drag. I want stories to take more chances in how they tell the stories they tell. On the flip side, much as I enjoy the games played in more experimental works, I often find that they end feeling incomplete and unsatisfying, that they end up forgettable because they lack emotional punch. They leave no mark. In putting Clockwork Phoenix together I searched for stories, that for me, occupied the happy middle between the two, that were adventures both in how they read and what they said.” (SF Scope, 8/19/08). That’s his story and he’s sticking to it.
Drawing on an example in Steve and Gemma’s novelette, he unwisely feels the need to add that the significance of the title Clockwork Phoenix is similar to the phrase “exquisite corpse,” an interesting juxtaposition of words that in and of itself means nothing. Although Catherine Asaro recently suggested to him that he should instead be claiming it stands for an obscure principle of theoretical physics.
Aside from the two Clockwork Phoenix volumes, Mike edited two volumes of the MYTHIC anthology series and has for ages been editor (and sometimes publisher) of the poetry journal Mythic Delirium (www.mythicdelirium.com), which published a new poem by Neil Gaiman in its 10th anniversary issue earlier this year. His writing achievements have been as esoteric as his tastes in fiction: though he is still trudging through a first novel draft at thi
s writing, he has three times won the Rhysling Award for best speculative poem and seen his work reprinted in the Nebula Awards Showcase series. He’s the author of two hefty book length collections of poetry: Strange Wisdoms of the Dead (a Philadephia Inquirer “Editor’s Choice” selection) and The Journey to Kailash. One of the original poems from the latter collection will be reprinted in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year Vol. 1.
A former president of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, he gave a presentation on “The Poetry of Science Fiction” at the Library of Congress in December ’08. He also gave several presentations that year extolling the literary work of his late friend, the legendary pulp fiction writer Nelson Bond.
His own fiction has appeared most recently in Weird Tales and Tales of the Talisman, with more forthcoming in Cabinet des Fées and the Norilana Books anthology Sky Whales and Other Wonders. His creepy second-person present-tense interior monologue horror story “The Button Bin” was a finalist for this year’s Nebula Award. His website is www.descentintolight.com and his blog on LiveJournal is http://time-shark.livejournal.com.
AFTERWORD
for the digital edition
I hope you’ve enjoyed this electronic edition of Clockwork Phoenix 2: More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness. My gratitude goes out to those who gave me the inspiration and tools to create it: Vera Nazarian, Charles M. Saplak, Rose Lemberg, Elizabeth Campbell, Michael DeLuca of Weightless Books and Erzebet YellowBoy Carr of Papaveria Press. And of course, my wife Anita, who guided the organization of these stories to emphasize their thematic links.
For the sake of expediency, and historical preservation, the biographies of the authors and your humble editor have been left as they were when this book was first published in trade paperback by Vera Nazarian’s Norilana Books in July 2009. However, much has happened in three years’ time. All of these writers have continued to blaze their own paths. Some have become editors of important publications. Some acquired major book deals, published new novels, were nominated for or even won major awards. I encourage you to click the links embedded in their bios to see what each one is up to now.
It occurred to me, too, that I should share a little about the bragging rights the authors in Clockwork Phoenix 2 accumulated after this book came out. Saladin’s short story was a finalist for the 2009 Nebula Awards, and was subsequently picked up for reprinting in Nebula Awards Showcase 2011 and David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer’s The Year’s Best Fantasy 10. The Hartwell and Cramer anthology also tapped Claude’s novelette, while Ann Leckie’s sf story was included in The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2010 Edition, edited by Rich Horton. Gemma and Stephen’s novelette also racked up accolades. It was short-listed for the 2010 Shirley Jackson Awards and the 2010 WSFA Small Press Award, and reprinted in Ellen Datlow’s The Best Horror of the Year 2. Along with Tanith’s novelette, Gemma and Stephen’s tale also made the Locus Magazine 2009 Recommended Reading List. Tales by Claude, Leah, Marie, Ian, Ann, Mary, Tanith, Gemma and Stephen, Kelly and Barbara received honorable mentions from various “best of the year” anthologies, and all the stories received critical acclaim from various corners.
Under the Mythic Delirium Books imprint I've already released the first volume in this series, Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness, available for sale at Amazon.com and at Weightless Books, and an adaptation of the most recent volume, Clockwork Phoenix 3: New Tales of Beauty and Strangeness, is still to come.
To exchange my editor hat for my author hat for a moment, I'm also planning to release a quirky book of my own: Sleepless, Burning Life, a critically acclaimed and somewhat controversial novelette written in the same style I used for the Clockwork Phoenix introductions, that first appeared in Steam Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories, edited by JoSelle Vanderhooft (Torquere Press, 2011.) I had previously announced a collection of horror stories, titled The Button Bin and Other Horrors, but as fortune would have it that collection was purchased by Apex Books, with a tentative release date set for early fall. I'll just have to come up with more projects, I suppose!
Watch for news of these and more at mythicdelirium.com.
—Mike Allen, February 2012
