Patricia S. Bowne

Beetle Specimens in a Lab, by Steve Winter. You can buy a poster from http://fineartamerica.com/art/all/biodiversity/posters. You know you want one!

I stayed so long in graduate school that they put me in the museum. Was this supposed to motivate me to finish? It didn’t; I liked being up there in the dry specimens’ collection, able to drool over the cases of stuffed hummingbirds whenever I wanted. It only confirmed my belief that a museum is a great place to work.

I had actually hung around museums all my life. Most of the places my father worked had small but serviceable museums, and I have a photo of myself at 5 playing with a live king snake in one of them.

note the cases of beetles in the background

In undergrad, my biology club took on the jobs of labeling the collection and creating weekly informational displays, jobs which involved maintaining live squirrel monkeys and an ill-tempered rattlesnake. In grad school I hung out in full-fledged research museums, with people who retrieved dead manatees and skeletonized them, skinned bats and flamingos, and on one memorable occasion took apart a dead grizzly bear next door to my office, playing loud country music throughout the process. People used to mistake my office for the museum, and once a man strode in and flung a dead Golden Eagle onto my desk. Continue reading →

This has been a year of coincidences for me, but the most amazing one happened this evening, at Thanksgiving dinner.

I was eating at my pastor’s house and she had invited her new neighbors, who’ve just moved into town from the other side of the US. All was going well when, amid the jollification, I heard one of the new neighbors mention the MLA.

Now you must know that, reasonably or not, I view the MLA attendees as my target market. A gigantic conference full of creative writing, literature, and humanities academics! But I have no legitimate business at a humanities conference, so I am always on the lookout for people who do and who might be so kind as to distribute promotional bookmarks there. I immediately launched into my elevator talk. As I did, my new acquaintance began to look more and more surprised.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “What’s your last name? — I’m X—-! I emailed you about your story in Year’s Best Fantasy! And I reviewed the novel on Amazon!”

I’m sure best-selling authors have this sort of thing happen all the time, but in my case we’re talking about a book that has sold mighty few copies, and one of three Amazon reviews. What are the odds that one of the three people in the world who had reviewed my book on Amazon would move across the continent to land across the hall from my pastor, and across the table from me at Thanksgiving dinner?

I know it’s a small world, but that is too small to believe. And of all the things I have to be thankful for this year – and they are a tremendous list – right now I’m most thankful for coincidences and happy surprises.

Osyth does not celebrate Thanksgiving, but a similar holiday falls about this time of year — like most Osyth holidays, its date varies depending on the movements of the elementals.  Kindling is celebrated after the winter elementals roar into town on a North wind, snatching hats and umbrellas, tossing garbage cans and tree branches from hand to hand.

But Kindling is not a celebration to welcome these rowdy spirits. At Kindling-tide, Osythites celebrate the ley-line and ask its protection through the long winter to come. They light fires on the line and burn tributes. Any Osythite born can tell of some childhood treasure given up in a fit of piety and then sorely regretted — for tribute balls are made beforehand, wrapped in layer upon layer of colored paper and metallic thread, and sit in the living room long enough for enthusiasm to grow cold. Many a child has secretly reclaimed a tribute from one of the balls, but found later that there was no-place to play with it undiscovered and, more than likely, buried it on the very ley-line they begrudged it to.

Other parts of the ritual are less stressful. The Fruited Bough hangs over the mantel for a few weeks or a month before the celebration, decorated a bit a day with tokens of gratitude. After tribute burning, the bonfire is lively with jokes and fireworks. The most exciting moment, though, is when some nimble relative ignites the fruited bough at the bonfire and rushes it blazing back into the house, carrying warmth from the ley-line to specially prepared candles and homefire. Then come feasting and drinking, games and songs; and always, as each guest arrives or departs, the Kindling blessing:

“Light against night, heat against cold, be with this house and all in it!”

Happy Kindling to all of you, and may your homes be warm in all ways, all winter.

Kris Vasquez reviewed A Lovesome Thing at Amazon. Thanks, Kris! You were the first to buy and the first to review!

Geranium Cat has read both books and reviewed them together. Another first, and many thanks! For folks interested in Neil Gaiman’s work, Geranium Cat has also written some fascinating posts on a group read of his latest story collection.

And a very long review of Advice From Pigeons by Heather Brush and Mama Sylvia — who didn’t like it much, but still put enormous effort into giving me useful, detailed feedback. An insightful critic is worth her weight in gold.

My father always remembered Guy Fawkes day, mainly because of the poem.

“Please to remember
The Fifth of November,
Gunpowder treason and plot.
I see no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Ever should be forgot.”

How a little boy in New York state learned this British poem, I’m not sure; I suspect his nanny, who I also believe taught him to like treacle tart and to wear an orange tie to the St. Patrick’s Day parade. Continue reading →

Colleges try harder than a lot of other workplaces to keep the ‘we’re all family’ thing going. I think faculty try harder than a lot of other employees to believe in it. But every now and then you get a slap in the face and are reminded that it is, in the end, an employer-employee relationship.

That happened to me this week, when I tripped over a student backpack and banged up my knee. I finished work, went home to ice the knee, and got a call from school. Had I filed an incident report with HR? And when I notified HR, a flurry of other calls came in — the upshot being that I had to get up off my sofa, go out in the rain, and get a blood alcohol and drug test at a clinic halfway across town.

Sure, I know why insurance requires it. And I know why it’s better to do it to everybody than make distinctions which then would have to be justified themselves. Still, I was not pleased. As a writer, though, I have a mental recourse other employees may not enjoy, so as I sat in the waiting room I tried to figure out how this sort of thing would play out with faculty who had been injured by demons, or by being cursed by colleagues. I will get something useful out of this, beyond the occasionally necessary reminder that it’s just a job.