(So, like, what’s with the beer in the photo? Over on Omnivoracious, I’m soliciting suggestions for books to feature with Stone Brewing’s latest act of genius–said act included sending us two bottles of amazing beer. So, here, your fav nonfic crazy books. There, your fav books to pair with beer. Go to it, my peoples!)

I love eccentric nonfiction, in part because I get some of my funniest fictional ideas from such books. In the past, I’ve enjoyed the heck out of any number of slightly “off” texts, including a book on penguins where the author went off on long rants about misclassifications and the backstabbing that goes on in the penguin studies community. There’s something about eccentric nonfiction that points out the inherent absurdity of our situation as living beings. Which is to say, we establish these parameters for reality and we abide by them, the data reinforced by the evidence of our five senses and our brain’s ability to process and analyze information. We tell ourselves that certain things are more real than others—for example, chemistry is more real, based on more facts, as a branch of science than, say, a soft science like sociology. And yet, when it comes down to it, everything is still processed through our slightly illogical, definitely subjective, maybe-having-a-bad-day brains.

So, you wind up with a lovely subset of nonfiction that often reads like Kinbote from Pale Fire is your narrator. Sometimes this is because the writer is truly a bit cracked. Sometimes it’s because even a decade can turn a serious nonfiction book into…fiction.

Then, there are books that you can’t not take seriously and yet also seem full of crazy in the best possible way. For example, I’ve recently been reading the two-volume set Paradigms & Fairy Tales: An Introduction to the Science of Meanings by Julienne Ford (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975)

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(Looks so evil. Not evil. Demented and nuts, but not evil.)

So. We have a new cat, who looks like the devil sometimes (see above) and sometimes looks like this:

Other times, the cat looks like this:

We got him from neighbors down the street who had put up a “Free Cat” sign as part of their garage sale. Because, with three cats already and all kinds of time commitments, we needed another beast in our lives. But Ann bonded and I enabled, and we took the cat, which otherwise might’ve gone back to the pound. The cat seemed well-fed, healthy, and apparently had a chip already.

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In addition to the usual great content, the latest Clarkesworld has run my round-robin interview with eight writers I think of as cool and “emerging,” since “new” doesn’t quite cover it: Jesse Bullington, N. K. Jemisin (also in this issue with fiction), Tessa Kum, Meghan McCarron, Shweta Narayan, Jeremy C. Shipp, Angela Slatter, and Genevieve Valentine. (A tip of the hat to the Emerging Writers Network, by the way–they don’t own the term “emerging writer,” but they’re why I thought of using it.)

Every once in awhile, it’s good for a fool like me, entering mid-career, to check the pulse of what’s going on among the emerging writers who will one day call you a curmudgeon. Keeping tabs on this unruly, diverse lot not only lets you see the end of the road coming from much farther away and softens the often abrupt transition from “young turk” to “old fart”—it also re-energizes you and helps ensure that your reading patterns don’t get too predictable. Usually, I keep up via blogs and online fiction, but I thought it would be interesting to interview a few emerging writers about subjects like their connection to the larger community, where they see themselves in five years, what they’ve been reading, and their take on mammals versus large reptiles. A kind of core sample, if you will.

Go check it out–and below the cut here, since the interview was already running long, and they couldn’t include photos, you’ll find–the photos! What a bunch these writers are, from their mugshots. Bullington was such a tough I couldn’t even get his photo to load into flickr. Heh.

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Pushed this up in the order for those who might’ve missed it.

Incoming transmission, through the filaments…

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Just some nice capybara goodness to wash away a little bit of the fail below…

(The wonderful Holly Black deconstructing Hansel & Gretel for the Shared Worlds students.)

A couple of deadlines are taking up my time, but I wanted to post the link to the photo set for Shared Worlds.

Shared Worlds is a unique two-week writing camp for teens. We’re in our second year, and it’s a wonderful blend of learning, fun, and, of course writing. The students build their worlds in the first week and write stories in them the second week. This year, guest writers included Tobias Buckell, Will Hindmarch, Holly Black, Darin Bradley, Ann VanderMeer, and moi. They did a lot of hard work, which I’ll talk about in blog posts later this week–as well as the excellent faculty.

A few sample photos…

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I love botanical gardens, so it was a happy confluence when I noticed a sign for the Daniel Stowe Botanical Gardens at an exit off of I-85 on my way to the Charlotte airport after Shared Worlds. I had three hours until the flight, so I stopped at the gardens for a good forty minutes. Such gardens often strike me as somewhat fanciful, even fantastical, in the confluence of whimsical elements. This garden was interesting because of the high number of water features.

It was a doubly delightful detour because it turned out I could drive on from the gardens to the airport, and the whole drive–to the gardens and then on to the airport–was through just lovely, scenic countryside and small towns. Next year, Ann and I will definitely want to explore the area further.

Anyway, here are some photos, with the whole set on flickr.

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Although I will be blogging generally about the teen writing camp Shared Worlds (for which I serve as assistant director) over the next few days, I thought I would start out with something specific: the Shared Worlds chapbook that collected their artifact and bestiary writing exercises in saddle-stapled form. With great support from the teaching assistants and Cathy Connor in IT, we were able to create and print this nice memento of the students’ experience within about four-days–largely due, of course, to John Coulthart’s expertise and experience.

The exercises only capture a little snapshot of what the students were up to–and they produced a lot of cool stuff, including their full story in week two–but we thought it important to give them something to take away from the camp. In the back of the chapbook, we included space for autographs. So after we surprised them with it on the second Friday, the students were able to go around and have everyone sign it, too. (See photos below.)

John did great job with the images, and as you can see one student, Noah, even included diagrams as part of his artifact entry.

The two exercises were really about leveraging and stretching your imagination. On the first day each student got an “artifact”–an object that they had to recontextualize in their shared world, which meant they had to by the end of week one, with their worlds fairly complete, to turn in two to four paragraphs on how that object fit into their milieu. It could be something owned by or of significance to a character, a piece of a country’s history, or just about anything. Part the point, given that many of the artifacts are pretty mundane, ordinary things, is to show the students that anything in the real world can be fodder for their fantastical writing. Some students even used their artifact paragraphs as the basis for their complete story in the second week.

The bestiary exercise has them pair up and write about their partner as if that person were a fantastical animal, using their powers of observation (in a nice way) to tell the reader something true about that person. This exercise served as a nice way to get a fanciful author’s bio for each student in the back of the chapbook. (It’s also part of a longer series of exercises Ann and I do as part of adult workshops.)

Here, then, are a few relevant photos, with more on Shared Worlds generally tomorrow.

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(Ann with the students, this past Saturday)
Frankly, the last week is a blur. I forgot how much time and energy you spend on a workshop like Shared Worlds, and how patient you have to be about doing things like blog posting and other stuff on your plate.

The photos below show Holly Black from the first week, the students with Holly, them in class, with Ann, and presenting their worlds. I’ll have more text soonish, on Amazon and elsewhere, and you can also check out my mobile uploads to Facebook here.

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Some relaxing cat texture for your Friday. Thank you, and good night. I must gets off the intratubes.

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