By Randy Lugo

That morning, the idea crossed Mary’s mind that she would never again see the sun pouring down like a shower of corn. It was raining, drops crashing blindly against the earth, the roof quivering after each thunder.

Like she did every morning, Mary fixed some coffee and sat in the kitchen to drink it and to admire the avocado tree she had planted on her patio — a tree that had never given her a single avocado.

“I don’t know if I can wait another thirty years for your avocados,” she exhaled. But the tree was busy fighting a battle with the wind and with the fat drops that were chopping its leaves and shredding its branches. Mary felt the same drops in her bones, pounding.

Maybe the phone rang that morning, but maybe Mary didn’t want to be on the phone. Maybe the tree, fed by the river, was in fact a hand coming down to earth to wave hello and a final goodbye to Mary, as she used to tell Clara, the nun from San Martin Hospice who took care of her on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.

Full of memories, she finished her coffee and turned on the little black radio she had perched on the windowsill. She forgot the rain for a moment, caught up in the lyrics that she would never forget, the ones about the star that learned to fly low, close to the earth so her lover could touch her. “He touches her with his naked hand, slow…” Mary hummed, smiling. Life wasn’t that bad, after all; the rain was just a dance partner for lonely hearts, a partner that wouldn’t abandon Mary Compas, the Queen of the Baralt Cabaret, on a Saturday morning after being diagnosed with a disease too ugly to be aired in the family. She was only depressed, not sick. Or she was sick, but not depressed.

Happiness was a smokescreen that hid the melancholy behind a gray veil. Gray, like the cloud that had carried along the morning storm which now took out the power with a thunderous boom, silencing the radio.

Sister Clara phoned Mary from the hospice to tell her she couldn’t make it, that the roads were flooded, but there was no answer. In the end, who knows what was on Mary’s mind that morning. Was she sad because of the rain? So let the rain answer. Did she see the first avocado on her tree, finally, and go out to pick it when the river burst its banks? Then let’s wait until the waters settle and ask the tree. It will still be out there, waving.

###

Photograph by Flickr user emdot, used under a Creative Commons license.

Randy Lugo likes simple stuff like books, sunsets, and bikes. He works as a marketing copywriter during the day and is the author of A Few Bad Jokes and How to Be Confused All the Time. His forthcoming book, Los Polvos Ninjas, has been rewritten several times and, according to him, it hasn’t been published because he is still thinking about turning it into a movie script or just publishing it as a novel. Does his indecisive personality making him an intellectual wonderer? Maybe! In his free time, he participates in epic bicycle rides, wilderness-appreciation hikes and literature odysseys. Follow Randy on Facebook.

[Click for detail]

Previously: Divot

###

Dyana Valentine is all up in your face with the delicious, nutritious truth. She’s a professional instigator (seriously), a hot, brilliant mess, a fire hose in a garden hose world. She follows her own advice: be quick off the line and excited to fail. Titillated? Sure you are. Click here for more Dyana.

By Streetlights Imagination

It was late and still warm outside, but what I remember most was the overwhelming darkness that hovered the air. It was its own entity – not a frightening one, just a knowledgeable one – and it comforted me.

I felt small standing there. I was small in comparison to the hugeness that held me tightly. And the car I was leaning against gave me no concept of scale for what was around me. I was in a snow globe of desert stars, head raised up with eyes closed, feeling the desert’s fullness in the warm silence.

I opened my eyes seeking something that I didn’t know at the time. I wanted to know something. Anything. It wasn’t a crisis of faith; I have that. It wasn’t necessarily a need to know who I was in relationship to the universe; I know that. Yet, my eyes opened wide and desperately sought out the stars for something that I couldn’t understand and wasn’t able to articulate.

Have you been there before? There, under the stars in the desert? That place where the only sound you hear is the moment when your breath changes from in to out? If you have then you know where I was – it was the place where the night’s darkness seeks you out, crawls into your empty spots and fills you. It’s where you want to fall to your knees, weeping, for no other reason than to know you can feel.

I saw it at that moment, right when the emptiness was filled, when my eyes focused in the night. It was the Milky Way stretching across the whole of the sky. The stars were so comfortable there inside its custody, lazily arranging themselves where they belong. There is no pretense to the stars. The light we see from them radiates from millions of years ago. There is nothing more genuine than stars; we would not be here to see their artificiality and so there is no reason to try.

This moment here with the stars and the Milky Way and the desert’s darkness whispered away some, if not all, of the strain of the past years’ struggles. My trials were real and significant and so were the effects on me and my family. And yet, now it seems so long ago.

So, so long ago.

The reflection of time that appears now from then is as if it is the same as the stars’. Millions of years shine upon us. And this is how it often is with such things. We merely feel what was and we will send off into the night what will be.

The night around me grew darker still as I gazed up, wondering at all the stars that night had first seen that were now reflecting on me, The Milky Way tucking them in close so they didn’t get lost in their storytelling. Their whispers calmed me. These ancestors knew me, and I was humbled.

For all the times I wondered, “Why?” at what I had experienced in the past, crying and questioning the purpose of my trials, I knew, then, what my choice could be – and it always is a choice. I could continue to always question and anguish, or I could be a part of this moment and become a reflection of time.

There is a certain peace in reflecting time – a certain anchoring in space while dancing in the ambiguity. Time becomes real and unforgotten. It becomes part of that desert silence and welcomed into that ancestral light.

I stepped into the car as a star fell and watched the desert catch it.

Silence.

###

Photograph by Jeremy Stanley, used under a Creative Commons license.

“Let it always be known that I chose joy over despair, family over the world, and to fight when it mattered. Welcome to me. I give a damn.”

Streetlights Imagination can be found on Twitter, Facebook, or on her blog.

Belinda and I met on Twitter and bonded over old punk songs, science fiction, and the fact that we’re “tough chicks who are softies on the inside,” as she puts it. And then I got a look at her art and was blown away. Stark, raw, sometimes mocking, sometimes painful, it all retains an essential sort of feminine, musical spirit. It’s very, very good. And the world is, for the second time in Belinda’s life, taking notice.

Photo by Bo Duvenage

EAG: Tell me about how you got your start.

BB: I just started. I came from a really poor family. I didn’t study; I left home the first day I could, and just fell into art, not knowing what I was doing, but just knowing that I really wanted to do it. I was about 23, which is late to emerge, but young to have had the success that I had in the ‘90s—which terrified me. I was too young; and not having studied, I hadn’t had time to think, even, about what I was doing. So the first year I was really successful and booked my first solo, which was even more successful. And things kind of exploded, and I imploded. And I went into television for about 15 years. I did investigative journalism, social current affairs—in a way, all the same stuff that feeds my art. Content-wise, probably exactly the same. It’s just that art is a very different way of expressing my view of the world.

You say you imploded; what happened?

It was completely amazing. There were very few female artists in South Africa. Contemporary arts here haven’t actually been taken seriously. There’d been a recent suicide of a very amazing local South African artist because he thought he would never sell his work. He just thought, It’s a black hole. At that time the political situation was really tough, and art’s always been the thing we use to fight. I say we; I’m speaking about my generation and my circles of friends. Art’s been the one thing where we could have a voice. So I kind of emerged a little young; rude, cheeky, and kind of subtle in some ways. It was just the right thing at the right time. My shows sold out and I got international shows and there was just demand, from gallery and dealers, and connectors. And I was so fucking hardheaded and stubborn, and I just went no, no, I’ll do something else to earn money—I’m not going to put out ten of these works because ten people want them. So, I soon started in TV. I love television. It was great, so I carried on. And about four years ago I started moving back towards finding a place in art again, but independently. Without galleries or fellow artists all grabbing, pushing and pulling.

What precipitated the return to making art?

I got shot.

Oh, my God!

It’s life in South Africa. Though I know it’s violent everywhere. I was just finishing a documentary and I got home late. I undid my gate. The motor on it wasn’t working, so I had to get out to manually open it. And two guys, obviously from one of the gangs [shot me]. I got shot, and all they did was take the stuff out of my car. I was living in Johannesburg at the time and I decided to get out—fuck it. It was obviously a really intense experience, and I thought, I’m now going to change every single thing to move closer to where I actually want my life to be. So I did. I left Joburg and went back to the coast. My one promise that I made myself was that I would return to art, which I’d desperately been wanting to do. I was at that point so far removed from the art world, and the politics of the art world, that to even think of starting to network back into that felt miles away. And it’s taken a long time, like three years.

An experience like that obviously changes your life.

Completely changes your life. But it’s not necessarily in a bad way. Even though it’s a bad thing. It can bring about a lot of good changes.

In a very real way, that’s what an artist does, though, isn’t it? You take an experience, and you sublimate it, and you present the world with something else altogether.

Exactly. Yes.

What was the first thing you did after you moved back and thought, well, okay, now I’ve got to start this upward climb all over again?

My old art dealer had left Joburg long ago and he lived in the same town as my mum. It’s a tiny little coastal town. He’d always said to my mum, “Tell her just to move here and come and work.” So I thought, Okay, cool, I’ll take the opportunity to make the move. At least it was some sort of job closer to the art world. So I did that. But the small town gallery didn’t really work, so I moved closer to Cape Town. Cape Town and Johannesburg are the largest cities in South Africa, so it made sense.

How do you juggle everything you’re doing? It’s the age-old question for women, right?

I don’t know! I can’t answer that. I just keep going. Sometimes one day at a time. Sometimes [I’m] a puddle of tears. Sometimes when I have a child-free night I just go and dance for a night and that kind of fuels me for a month or so. And my friends. Fuck, my friends. A large reason why I get by, just the most amazing people in my life. Also, I’m a single mum. I’ve just come out of a five-year relationship, like a month ago. I’ve always been a single mum. I was never really with my kid’s dad. It’s always been me and him. And it’s made it difficult for relationships. I think it’s really hard for people. So, I had a relationship for the last five years, which just wasn’t happy anymore. Now I just want to raise my kid and not focus too much on other stuff. Kid and career, I think, is enough.

It’s a lot. Either one by itself can be all-encompassing.

This [motherhood] experience of something so unconditional—unconditional love—has for me been the most mind-blowing. It softens one.

Which is hard for tough chicks who are softies on the inside!

I know! You can’t actually help those fucking tears anymore.

[We move on to the topic of Twitter.]

It’s so weird how much you know about each other through Twitter. I mean you could probably write this whole interview with me just from what you know on Twitter and it would probably be totally accurate.

How long have you been on?

A year. My brother eventually forced me. I’ve made contact with projects and people…it’s been so amazing. Twitter’s just fucking fantastic.

It strips away most of the bullshit and everybody’s equal.

You strip away all the physical and material shit. It’s been really, really fantastic.

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For more on Belinda’s work, check out belinda.co.za

By P.R. McDowell

These lines ain’t half seen some action…

Boy-like blokes play fighting
Voices raising
to sarcastic one-up competitive slurs,
They sway and curse under street-light stages.

Not so bright
Orange girls
Dressed up in extended fakery from head to toe;
Hold hands
for balance
not provided by thick high heels.
They repeat a boozy mantra of
“You’re my bff, luv ya soo much”
“Omg; nur way, a luv yu more!”
as salty beads well in eyes
Crocodile tears,
Earlier Bex slapped Chelle for eyeing up “her man”
The guy who clumsily felt her up in the unisex loo.

Nearby
some suit pinches his nose and sniffs loudly,
The smells of disinfectant and highs
cloying in his sinuses
From thick lines snorted earlier
off a porcelain counter,
At the start of lads’ night out.

And standing alert near the end of the platform
A couple are lost in each other;
Wrapped up
all arms and lips,
They cherish the moment.

The boy-men lose control of their immaturity
After one push too many,
They begin to brawl.
The wanna be barbies scatter,
High spirits rising in their throats
as cocktails are purged.
Suit cradles his bass battered head;
The couple ignore all,
As they love, fingers tracing contours…

These lines ain’t half seen some action.

###

Image by Matt Wilkinson, used under a Creative Commons license.

P.R. McDowell is a writer of poetry, scripts and generally anything which sparks his creativity. Since late 2006 he has begun to be known for his writing. During 2008/2009 he had poems published on the online gallery Sometimes When I Wake At Night.

He began performing poetry at the Freed Up! poetry night which was done monthly at the now closed Greenroom in Manchester & hosted by Dominic Berry and Steve O’Connor, where along with other long time regular performers there, he became known as a Freed Up! veteran.

P.R. has also performed at the 2011 Environlution Festival; wrote a collaborated poem titled “Twist the Knife” with the poet Graham Halsey, and has performed at events including Poets Get Mashed, Magical Animals, Stirred, Beatification, Bang Said The Gun: Manchester, Guitar n’ Verse, and Once More With Meaning (which he was a guest compére at).

He is currently preparing for the start of production of his first independent film “True Colours” and he is also the founder of the arts organisation Light In The Dark (founded by himself, the photographer Damien Hayward, and the poet Nadeem Zafar in August 2011). Light In The Dark is an arts organisation unlike any other, run by artists for artists with the aim to get a venue of its own to run as a community-based hub providing a performance platform for artists; they are also a support development source for aspiring artists by providing them with support & development (advice, guidance & PDP’s). He can be found on Facebook or on Twitter at @P_R_McDowell.

By Emma Alvarez Gibson

Sarah Aroeste was a trained, Ivy League-educated opera singer. For most of her life, opera had been everything. Until the day came when she realized, with undeniable clarity, that opera was not her calling. And not only that: she realized that her calling was, instead, an ancient musical tradition with very little mainstream presence.

It was a dark time, she says, in spite of the fact that she knew she’d found what she was meant to do.

But she’d long since felt the pull of her Ladino roots, embedded in her Sephardic ancestry. (A bit of background: Sephardic, or Sephardi, Jews define themselves in terms of the Jewish customs and traditions originating in the Iberian Peninsula. Ladino is one of the names of the language once spoken by Sephardic Jews. A Romance language, its origins lie in Medieval Castilian Spanish, but it was heavily influenced by Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Turkish, Greek, and other languages.)

Spain began expelling its Jews in 1492, and many families, including Aroeste’s, ended up settling in the Ottoman Empire.

“My family has the typical immigrant story,” she says. “My grandfather came to the United States during the Balkan Wars. Assimilation was big with his generation; they wanted to forget what they were escaping from. A lot of the traditions weren’t passed on.”

So while the family enjoyed Sephardic foods and some Ladino songs at their gatherings, there was no one Sarah could ask about family history and tradition. As time went on, she fell in love with Ladino music, independently of her family. During a summer program at the Israel Vocal Arts Institute in Tel Aviv, Nico Castel, one of the world’s leading experts on Ladino, introduced her to a huge amount of Ladino music. Sarah ended up studying with him at the Met, and her time with him culminated in a series of recitals, each one of which contained a section of Ladino songs.

“Every single time,” she says, “audience members would say that was the part they loved the most.”

At some point, it all clicked. She realized that Ladino music was her true calling, and she knew it was time to make a change.

“Opera was all I had known. But I dusted off an old guitar I had lying around from high school and searched online for a guitar teacher. I found one inside of 15 minutes, and started taking lessons.”

“He was a real rock and roll player and we just clicked,” she says. “And then we realized that we had the same Ladino background. It seemed like fate! We started playing these Ladino songs, but not the way of our grandparents. It was in a way that really resonated with my contemporary life. They were a new interpretation of background and identity- Ladino folks songs with a modern lens. So I took a huge leap of faith. Giving up a dream of opera to start a Ladino rock band? You just don’t do that!”

Indeed, “you just don’t do that” was a refrain she began to hear from some members of the Sephardic community.

“Because I was coming at this cultural perspective from a different point of view,” she says, “I got a lot of backlash at first. It was hard for me to prove to them that I wasn’t adulterating the music just for the sake of being modern. Especially in thebeginning, I was very careful not to push boundaries too far. At the time—2001—there were very few people playing Ladino music, especially with a rock approach.”

Then, too, there was the simple fact that Aroeste is, in a surprise twist, female.

“Many traditional religions won’t listen to a woman singing. It took me by surprise, especially as I come from the world of opera. I got a call from a group in LA one day. They said, ‘We love your music, we want to book you, can someone else sing the music?’”

Even when people did want to listen, she was criticized for being too sexy.

“It was ungrounded,” she says. “So much of the music in the Ladino tradition is graphic, [but] so adoring of women’s bodies. I was singing music that already existed. Think about the Mediterranean, where so much of this music came from: it’s hot in both senses of the word. And given that so much of Sephardic culture was female-based, I was taken aback by all of this criticism. Many of the songs are simple stories, based around the home.”

Fast-forward a few years, of course, and now it’s easier to find female-led Sephardic groups.

“There’s real acceptance now,” Aroeste says.

Her latest album, Gracia, is a tribute to Gracia Nasi Mendes, one of the wealthiest and most powerful women of Renaissance Europe.

“Her story is so amazing. Forget that she was Jewish, a conversa, a woman – during the Renaissance she became one of the richest people in Europe. She lent money to the church, she acquired the largest naval fleet in Europe, and then acquired safe passage for hundreds of Jews to escape the Inquisition,” she says.

(In what is perhaps a loaded bit of commentary, the title track on the album features an excerpt from a speech given by Gloria Steinem in 1971.)

Aroeste is one of few singers across the globe who actually writes her own songs in the Ladino language today.

“One of the things I care most about is respecting the tradition, giving value to the lyrics,” she says. “Don’t just sing the music out of rote historical memory! There’s such a fear that Ladino culture is dead. But we can’t preserve a culture by living backwards. We need to be creating new art in the culture to move it forward. Ladino is a treasure trove of ideas and beauty. It’s meant to be on a wider world stage.”

For more of Sarah Aroeste, visit www.saraharoeste.com.

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Emma is a cheerfully obsessive writer, editor and creative gun-for-hire. She’s had a hand in all types of media, at every step in the process. Jack Move is her fifth from-scratch magazine. (Clearly, this has become A Thing.) She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son. Follow her on Twitter (@ealvarezgibson) and find out more atwww.emmaalvarezgibson.com.

By Emma Alvarez Gibson

In the end, the police who showed up after I’d called 911 blamed it on me. I shouldn’t have spoken to my father that way, they said. I was 16 and had shown a distinct lack of respect, they said. Perhaps we should discuss it as a family over the dinner table tonight, the female officer told me, clearly annoyed and bored. I understood.

“You’re right,” I said to them. “Thank you.”

Once they were gone, we packed. And then we loaded up the car.

My father returned just before we left, glaring at me.

“You know, none of this was necessary,” he said to me.

And he was right.

###

Photo by Ant Standring, used under a Creative Commons license.

Emma is a cheerfully obsessive writer, editor and creative gun-for-hire. She’s had a hand in all types of media, at every step in the process. Jack Move is her fifth from-scratch magazine. (Clearly, this has become A Thing.) She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son. Follow her on Twitter (@ealvarezgibson) and find out more at www.emmaalvarezgibson.com.

By Robert Greer

enforced fun (for the first five minutes)
after that, an ejaculating racket

ordinarily tortious but for the worship of the warships and what-fer
and for what?

the nationalism priapism bursting our biospheric bubble,
leaving us to float alone in the breath-strangled, star-spangled rubble?

hot dogs are barbed cocks slicing you up from the insides

###

Photograph by Barry Yanowitz, used under a Creative Commons license.

Robert is a law student in Chicago by way of Southern California.  He has worked in presidential campaign offices, legal nonprofits, industrial shops, and oil fields.  His nonfiction has appeared on the Ordinary Gentlemen group blog, he has resolved to Tweet more, and he can be e-mailed here.

By Jack Move Staff

When Jordan Stratford took to Kickstarter to rally funding for his forthcoming book, Wollstonecraft, he set a modest goal of $4,000 — enough to pay for the book’s production costs. It wasn’t long before he blasted past this goal, landing at a staggering $91,751 by the time the campaign was complete. The book’s concept, a fictional universe based around an 11-year-old version of Ada (Byron) Lovelace and her friend, a 14-year-old Mary Shelley, as they seek out adventures in a steampunked 1826 London, hit all the right notes with backers, especially parents looking for, as he describes it, a “pro-math, pro-science, pro-history and pro-literature adventure novel for and about girls.”

Stratford is obviously the right person to be penning this project, with a style redolent of the same sort of gleefully over-dramatic past favored by the likes of Lemony Snicket of A Series of Unfortunate Events fame and The Decemberists. The bio on his Kickstarter begins: “Jordan Stratford has been pronounced clinically dead, and was briefly mistakenly wanted by INTERPOL for international industrial espionage.” He is also a Gnostic priest with a significant repertoire of both fiction and non-fiction writing, as well as the father of a nine-year-old daughter for whom the books are intended as an inspiration “to grow up to be a mad scientist and to take over the world.”

Stratford sat down with us recently to discuss Wollstonecraft, Kickstarter, and the reactions he’s received so far.

We know that your own daughter inspired the world of Wollstonecraft. Can you tell us about how the idea came about?

I live on a small artist-colony island where the children are pretty free-range. Not a helicopter parent in sight. The children form sudden, intimate tribes and then go run around in the forest poking dead things with sticks. This immersion in nature and independence keeps alive their natural scientific curiosity. How does this work? How does this thing connect with another thing? Watching this innate scientific dynamic between my daughter and her friends is a great inspiration, and got me thinking about girls in science. Given that Ada Lovelace and Mary Shelley made their contributions as teenagers, they make ideal role-models. They gave us everything from Star Wars to the iPad.

And of course as a boy I was an avid reader and admired the strong female characters in literature, from Anne of Green Gables to Bobbie in The Railway Children and George the tomboy from the Famous Five. I read Nancy Drew and Little Women. Growing up in a house full of sisters and running out of things to read, I’d grab anything.

I originally conceived of the project as an animated TV series, but I’m a screenwriter. I don’t have the same contacts in television as I do in film, so it sat as a treatment in a drawer for a years.

What have been some of the reactions you receive from women about the project?

“Shut up and take my money.” But generally, the women writing to me are looking at the media landscape and wanting alternatives for their daughters and I suspect retroactively for themselves. I hear a lot about how it’s the kind of series they wish they had read as girls.

Interestingly enough, the first wave of support came predominantly from dads of daughters. I think they just empathized with the kind of tools I want available for my own daughter. But as the project grew it was women-in-tech blogs and feminist blogs that really helped get the word out.

What has the writing process been like for you thus far?

Honestly, glacial. Working as a screenwriter you become very disciplined about setting personal deadlines and daily writing counts. Immediately after the campaign I had to have emergency surgery, which meant dealing with post op meds that made writing impossible. But even after that hurdle, writing Middle Grade is a very different discipline. It’s all about emotional movement of character and constant re-statement of theme. Each paragraph is much more careful than in YA or for other demographics. So my goals now are set by writing to story-beats rather than word count. Much slower process.

Why aren’t there more good books out there about girls?

I think there are a lot of great Middle Grade books about girls. Judy Moody, A Series of Unfortunate Events with a brilliant female lead, Eva Nine from the Wondla series. But certainly there are fewer choices in Middle Grade than there are in Early Readers or YA. Can’t speculate as to why.

What challenges did you face getting into the mindset of writing from a girl’s perspective?

Almost none. I’m immersed in the background chatter of tween girls. It’s ambient. I have my daughter and her friends do a voice read after I write a chapter, spotting vocab hurdles and making sure I’m not talking over them, or worse, down to them.

What does your daughter think about the books so far?

She’s my champion and cheerleader and critic. Her enthusiasm for the books keeps me from even thinking of slacking off.

What do you think made your Kickstarter campaign so wildly successful? Would you go that route again? How has it affected your process?

Yes, it’s replicable. I made a very honest, straightforward case for the kind of project I was passionate about, and invited others to join in and make it happen. So it was the pitch and the project first and foremost. I had great assets in the form of an illustration by Claire Robertson, which instantly conveyed the tone. I didn’t make the video too slick or too commercial, but kept it close to my own authentic response – I really love these characters and profoundly admire the contributions they made. But aside from that I had a very deliberate, very carefully orchestrated social strategy and media strategy. It was a full time job managing the campaign. And after that, because we were no longer talking about a single book but an entire world that my backers requested, I had to spend a lot of time in putting together a team that could manage the funding responsibly. That meant lawyers and incorporation and tax accountants and an agent and a complete business set up. When you have thousands of people to whom you’re accountable, and tens of thousands of dollars to account for, you have to make sure that all your ducks are in a row. Did that affect my process? It totally hijacked it. But now I’m on the other side of that, I’m just a writer again, and that’s a tremendous relief.

The campaign in a nutshell was this: Saturday morning I made the campaign and submitted it. It went live Monday night asking for $4,000, which we hit by Thursday morning. A week later, we’d doubled our goal, and by the end of that week we’d hit $20,000 because of exposure in boingboing, cnet, io9, geekmom. But when Kickstarter put the project in their newsletter under “Projects We Love” we made $20,000 that day and $10,000 the next. So it was the Kickstarter community that really wanted the world of Wollstonecraft to be bigger, with more books and teachers’ guides and short stories etc. The deal was that I couldn’t commit to publishers or illustrators or anybody else’s timeframe, but as long as the budget increased, I’d keep writing and making the world bigger. It was completely about the community, and I let them direct the project – it was my idea, but it’s their money, and I just kept asking how they wanted it allocated.

How does your non-fiction writing influence your fiction writing, and vice versa?

I think if you can write, you can write anything. If you can use words to evoke a response in the reader, that can be a love letter or a technical manual. But I’m known as a writer on spirituality and the history of ideas, like the evolution of alchemy into chemistry. So the history of science is very dear to me, particularly about how creative it is; leaps of intuition and imagination and the almost magical role of sheer blind luck in discovery.

You’ve got a fascinating set of titles: writer, producer, minister (or is it priest?). How did that particular combination come about?

Short attention span? I think it comes down to storytelling. And in my role as a priest it’s about witnessing the unfolding of personal stories. I come at all of this from a deeply Jungian bias, the idea that we are manifest stories, and understanding what happens next is intriguing, compelling and healing.

How does the Jordan Stratford of 2012 compare with what you imagined, at about age 10?

Honestly, spot on. I live in a house in the forest on a cliff with steps down to the beach, and I write stories all day. There are, however, fewer robots than in the 1976 version. Seriously. Where the hell are the robots? Roombas don’t count.

What’s next for you?

More of this, really. I’ve committed to an entire series, I’m wrapping the first draft of the first book, switching to a short set in the same world, then tightening the beats of book two, rewrite of book one, etc. I have a number of appearances as well, Rose City Comic Con, Comikaze in LA, Steamcon in Seattle, all shoehorned around a research trip to London. All going well there’ll be a screenplay in there. But my priorities are all about fulfilling my obligation to the community of backers and giving them the world they’ve so generously brought into being. That means keeping my head down and writing the series, and I’m not too concerned about anything after that.

###

Jordan Stratford can be found online at his website and on Twitter at @jordanstratford.

By Howie Good

It isn’t actually a wrecked stock car. I just call it that, the top two floors occupied, and the lower 48 on fire. The mirror on the wall has mastered the technique of waiting graciously for someone to appear. Meanwhile, I listen to the insect-like buzz of my own blood in embarrassed silence. The only instruction is FOLLOW ALL INSTRUCTIONS. There are naked women everywhere. I don’t think I’ll be doing laundry.

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Photograph by Thomas Hawk, used under a Creative Commons license.

Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Dreaming in Red, from Right Hand Pointing.