What Björk said when she said all is full of love
August 2024: Summer publications, gearing up for grad school, and a lot of thoughts on Lee Isaac Chung's Twisters
This month, I finished an excellent book: Jeanette Winterson’s tenth novel, Lighthousekeeping. At the advent of one of its stormy, interlocking chapters, she plainly writes, “This is not a love story, but love is in it. That is, love is just outside it, looking for a way to break in.” To me, this quote is Twisters.
Anyone who has been forced to spend more than twenty minutes in my presence since maybe April of this year has learned firsthand that I was really, really excited for Twisters. I was sold from the minute my best friend and I saw the trailer play before Challengers and I realized the legacy title it was dramatically spelling out (between shots of an artfully rain-drenched Glen Powell and an artfully Xanax-needing Anthony Ramos) was going to end with an “s.” I thought, oh boy. There’s not just going to be one twister here. There’s going to be, as Brandon Perea crowed, TWINS!!! I gathered all my friends and my notoriously cinema-averse fiancé to attend opening night in the Dolby Theater at the Metreon. I bought one of the shirts from Super Yaki. I wore my cowboy hat to the office that day. It was to be the axis on which my entire summer would spin. Of course the risk was that it would end up being a bad movie. Thankfully, it ended up being a really good movie—the best kind of movie, actually, a movie about the transformative power of love (and about Brandon Perea doing a backflip for no reason).
I do not just mean, of course, the obvious romantic love among the three leads. (2024 is truly the year of cinema throuples.) I also mean the love Kate has for the titular tornadoes (the worse the weather, the happier the girl) and how she finds her way back to it, in spite of everything that love of a dangerous thing has taken from her. I mean the love Tyler’s crew of gay dirtbag geniuses has for each other, for the storms they chase and the communities those storms tear apart; I mean the love for Oklahoma, where the rumbling wheat can sure smell sweet and so on—the love of a mother for her daughter. I mean: the way there was a time Javi would do anything for Kate. I mean: the way Tyler wants a copy of the photo. I mean: the way Kate lets go of the steering wheel. I mean: the way she crawls out of the wreckage, and they are both running to her.
The best dynamic in the movie is far and away the one between Kate (Jones) and Javi (Ramos), the sole survivors of a horrific storm that killed all of their friends five years prior. The absolute avalanche of baggage and unrequited love and survivor’s guilt and shattered innocence that surrounds them—and that Ramos in particular injects full-force into every movement and micro-expression in their scenes together—could carry a whole franchise IN MY OPINION. That said, the addition of Tyler (Powell), an outsider who is nonetheless as wild-hearted as Kate and Javi, is like sunlight breaking through clouds—narratively, for Kate, he resurrects the joy. And Jones balances the relics of that joy with the raw, tender wounds of her trauma with far more subtlety than I would maybe expect from a summer blockbuster where a tornado CATCHES ON FIRE because what’s scarier than a tornado, that’s right, a FIRE TORNADO. Her big, dewy, soulful brown eyes… fathomless with pathos.
Although obviously the star of the show is Brandon Perea as Boone.
Anyway, go see it. And yes, before you ask, I made it to a 4DX showing. I loved being launched out of my seat by Tyler Owens’s insane driving. This is what the cinema was built for.
Hi! I’m Gwen, and this is the first installment of my newsletter. I’m a writer of speculative fiction (mostly fantasy), a 2022 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, and a very-soon-to-be MFA candidate at San Francisco State University. I grew up in a series of hilly towns in California, and now I live in San Francisco with my fiancé and our two cats, Anya and Ducky. Since I have three entire stories out there to read on God’s Internet, with two more on the way—and am about to embark on the journey to an MFA in Fiction—I figured it was time to start a newsletter: to log my publications, share what I’m writing, and keep anyone who’s generous enough to take an interest in my work up to date on my career, whatever the hell that’s going to be, whatever weird little shape that takes. So, if you’re one of those generous souls, welcome! I’ll try to keep you entertained.
I am calling it the Creekside Drive Forestry Club.
NEW FICTION
This is the important part. I guess.
I had two stories come out in the month of June. An interesting coincidence: they are the two stories that, many years and drafts ago, I submitted to apply to Clarion. That was in early 2020, and they were quite different in form than they’ve become—still, by some miracle, the Clarion reading committee saw merit in them then, and I hope that in the time since I’ve been able to carve and whittle closer to the center of those stories, and to what they were trying to say.
“The Heart That Beats Behind the Bones” is about a person with no name or pronouns, called only eik. Eik lives in a secluded forest village where a priestess divines names and fates for the inhabitants based on their dreams. Eik and the priestess are childhood friends, and the two of them possess a complex, fragile bond that can only unfold in the private darkness of the priestess’s sacred home. As time goes on, eik comes to suspect that the priestess is withholding eik’s name from them, and eik begins to question everything. The piece can be read for free in Hearth Stories.
I wrote the beginning of this story under the sacral redwoods of the AIDS Memorial Grove in Golden Gate Park shortly after I had quit my almost comically toxic tech job to focus on writing and what the hell I actually wanted to make of it. I’d been inspired by the great Isabel Yap to apply to Clarion, and was taken aback to discover that they wanted not just one story in my application, but two. Since I had only one to my name (coincidentally, the other story I saw published in June), I had to think fast. Bouncing off of a story I had heard from a family friend about a Jola chief she had met, which I go into some detail about in the issue’s post-story interview, I found myself writing about a narrator without a gender, name, or purpose. What, I wondered, could be made of the self when all of that was stripped away, or, more accurately, not yet assigned by society? Who persisted in that body? And how do we connect with one another, learn one another, betray one another, heal one another, fall in love with one another in the dark when those identifiers don’t exist? How do we know ourselves? Is it possible? I like to think so. That’s what eik and the priestess’ story is about.
Sloum and Elevens are an absolutely incredible editing team and were wonderful to work with. The things they advocate for as editors, readers, and writers are aspirational, and they were both so generous with their time and their selves.
The first issue of Hearth Stories dazzled me and a part of me is still stunned that I was part of the summer solstice line-up. To read the issue, you can download the epub. The issue also contains interviews with each of the authors about their respective pieces, which is so lovely! It was also featured by the kind folks at Frivolous Comma.
“How Islands are Named” is a novelette about a small town called Deerneck, a natural lake called Lake McDermott, and how there was not an island in the lake until one morning there was. Where did it come from? Nobody has a clue. C.J. Derkins is a preteen with a bicycle and an inquisitive spirit, and she’s determined to find out—anything to dodge her sharp, angry ache of a sister, Rachael, who hasn’t been the same since their dad died a year ago. Their mother, June, doesn’t really know how to be there for either of them without losing sight of her own grief, which has come to own her completely. As the three of them are drawn closer to the island, they are also drawn closer to the wound none of them wants to talk about. It can be read for free on The Lit Nerds.
I wrote the very first draft of this story for a fiction class at City College of San Francisco; my peers in that group were the ones who first helped point me towards what I was trying to do. I first had the idea in 2017, after seeing this photograph attributed to Benjamin Giesbrecht:
My father died of colorectal cancer in 2011, in mid-July, a couple of weeks before my 19th birthday. I have written many stories about it in the years since—it being the guilt, the terror, the anger, the confusion, the missing him, the hardly even knowing him. Each year that passes moves him further away from me, but when I write about it, I can close the distance again, even momentarily, in a burst of speed and effort, reaching for the back of his shirt mid-sprint. “How Islands are Named” was probably my first serious attempt at articulating what it was like to be nineteen years old having watched my father die. I was a little kid again, unable to understand it but morbidly fascinated by the mystery; I was a seething half-adult, wanting the world to stop and mourn with me, resenting everyone that didn’t hurt as badly as I did. I felt like this thing had suddenly appeared in the world—my world—in the shape of what I felt, visible, undeniable, but nobody else cared to investigate it. It may as well have always been there.
I will always remember a workshop response I received at CCSF from my classmate Peter Geraghty. The story was quite different then, and notably unfinished; a lot more slipstream and indefinite, confusing even to me—but he understood it in a way even I didn’t at the time. I kept his printed out comments (dated October 2, 2018), and still have them to this day. He wrote at the end, “We can’t solve this mystery. Should we even try? Of course we should. It is the mystery of everything.” It was astonishing to have someone say something like that about something I had written, especially something that wasn’t even done, hadn’t even made its point. It was a response that was bigger than myself. It meant a lot to me.
I ended up revising, adding, rearranging, until the story was 12,000 words, and I submitted it with my application to Clarion. It was supplemented by “The Heart That Beats Behind the Bones” (then called “Frail Red Things,” and a crunched 2,000 words). How about that!
Its length prohibited it from being seriously considered at most paid markets. I submitted and submitted and submitted, got rejected and rejected and rejected. I tightened the screws and made some adjustments thanks to generous feedback from the insightful, incomparable Mary Thaler. I was moved by The Lit Nerds’s vibe call for stories with happy endings, a devotion to hope, and a willingness to romanticize everyday life. Those things are deeply important to me and integral to the stories I like to write. I was so touched that Kristen, Jaime, Anna, Rae, and Kelly saw those things in the final version of “Islands,” and gave it a home. They were a great team to work with; responsive, invested, and organized.
What I’m Playing
On the recommendation of two trusted friends, I started playing Final Fantasy IX in late spring. I absolutely adore it; the characters are so charming and the writing strikes such a gorgeous balance tonally between swashbuckling adventure and the crushing burden of having a self. Dagger is my favorite and her arc so far has been breathtaking—so much care is put into it, and I love how the game mechanics will bend to complement where certain characters are emotionally in the story. Zidane is also a charming, complex protagonist and so different from the FF boys I’m used to. Friendship is real, and it saves us.
What I’m Listening To
Twisters: The Album. I love how obvious it is which songs are from Javi’s point of view (marine-grade yearning), which ones are from Tyler’s (golden retriever-brained), and which ones are from Kate’s (just here to love Oklahoma). My favorites are “Ain’t in Kansas Anymore,” “Out of Oklahoma,” “Already Had It,” “Death Wish Love,” “Chasing the Wind,” and “Driving You Home.” Isn’t it insane that the compilation album for Twister had “Long Way Down” by the Goo Goo Dolls?! AND “How” by Lisa Loeb?! They knew what they were doing.
Born in the Wild by Tems. “Love Me JeJe” is the song of the summer. This has been my go-to album to put on in the background, any time of day.
Charm by Clairo. I like that it sounds like it could be playing while I smoke nice weed with my friends on a hot afternoon in the 1970s, an artful imitation of the quiet storm movement, Michael Franks meets Stephen Bishop. “Slow Dance” is my favorite.
Jensen McRae’s new single, “Massachusetts.” I think she is maybe my favorite singer at the moment, just from a vocal perspective. Her tone is so clear and deep and gorgeous, and not quite like anyone else’s. She is not trying to pretend she’s a soprano and that’s a breath of fresh air in today’s music scene sorry.
What My Friends are Doing
Lily M. Rosenthal, M. M. Olivas, and Anna-Claire McGrath attended the Lambda Literary Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices. Lily and Anna-Claire were in the YA cohort; M. M. was in the speculative fiction group. All three of them are phenomenal writers and Ones To Watch™.
M. M.’s debut novel, Sundown in San Ojuela, is available for preorder via Lanternfish Press.
In May, Anna-Claire had “I Love Him Artichoke” in The Deadlands. Anna-Claire was also a Best of the Net finalist for “Rats: A Love Story” in New Delta Review.
Also in May, the first installment of Andrew Dana Hudson’s The Rocky Cornelius Consultancy, “The Concept Shoppe,” appeared in Escape Pod.
Sara S. Messenger’s “The Clown Watches the Clown” appeared in Apex in June. They also just co-launched The WYRMHOLE with many other phenomenal writers.
LP Kindred guest edited the May 2024 issue of Haven Spec. Please boost his urgent GoFundMe to find stable housing in Chicago.
Ai Jiang’s Linghun won the Nebula Award and the Stoker Award for Best Novella.
Phoenix Alexander’s “Loamblood” was featured in Episode 77 of Space Cowboy Books Presents: Simultaneous Times in July, and “In Thin Air” appeared in The Dark in May.
When next you hear from me, I will have begun my MFA at San Francisco State University. I am at last coming out of what the graduate advisor called the “pink period” between being accepted and actually attending. I think those were her words; I know that the color pink was involved, and it was quite evocative. That is exactly what it has felt like: a long sunset, a rosy haze, where no feeling quite has a name. I will try to keep this newsletter up-to-date with tales of my experience for posterity.
In the meantime, be well, keep caring, watch Twisters.