Girl Into Heron
Dreamed 2017/11/7 by Wayan
for Ovid, Margaret Stohl, and Watts Martin
THAT DAY
Read two books. First: Royce Rolls, by Margaret Stohl, a farce (she claims it's a bit autobiographical) about a Los Angeles reality-TV family with absolutely no privacy. Teenage Bentley wants out, and does some ingeniously drastic stuff to get out. Funny. A solo departure from the Southern fantasy-horror that Stohl did with Kami Garcia--whose solo work just keeps repeating that same ol' devilism. Stohl's following her bad-girl thing down a different path here. The risk paid off.
Watts Martin, Why Coyotes Howl. Science fiction & fantasy tales, mostly furry. Not all--Still Life With Espresso is a Charles de Lint-ish fantasy on a painter who reads others' memories; her historical murals start revitalizing her 'hood. But many are straight wish-fulfilling furry/xenophilic romances. The story-structures and prose aren't always polished, but the emotions and issues he raises hit home. Bentley in Royce Rolls was fun, but I'm not a media-saturated human. This book makes it clear that skin or not, I am a fur.
Mainstream critics judge the artistry in depicting their human-consensus world. It's not that I MIND a great style, but... minorities like me are hungry to read about our issues and experiences outside that world.
Go to bed half-satisfied and half longing--my hunger for otherness sharper than ever. But then, Tolkien, in "On Fairy-Stories", his definitive essay on the function of fantasy, says that's the job of such tales. Mundane fiction polishes the doors of (normal) perception; fantasy cleans the doors of desire. We're too reasonable; think too small.
THAT NIGHT
NOTES IN THE MORNING
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