Thank you for all of you who pointed out to me, following my last email update, that you signed up for the updates, on purpose. And that I should not worry about sending them to you. You want to see them.
This should be obvious, and yet my mind cannot comprehend it sometimes. That someone would actually want to keep up with my writing, and that I wouldn't be annoying them to press the next story at them. So thank you for the resounding "do it." I will.
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Which brings me to the reason for this email: My flash fiction piece "The Making and Unmaking of a Witch" was selected as Gavagai's Editor's Pick this week!
I wrote this story at the beginning of the year during a flash fiction writing event in a writer's forum I participate in. I'd challenged myself to write things out of my wheelhouse for most of the event—mostly sci-fi, a lot of first person. But when I got to the last week, I went "Ok, time for some bread and butter," and wrote a third person story about a witch, why women were called witches, and threw in some of my feelings about how important herb gardens are. You can read it here.
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Once again, here are my stories that have come out so far this year, alongside order links for future stories!
There is one order link that I have yet to post: one of my favorite stories was accepted to a charity anthology a few weeks ago. When I have that link to share, I will!
Refilling the creative well
When I was little, I didn't like it when my mother sang me to sleep. She worried about this endlessly, as music and singing are very important to her. And then, one day when I was three and she was driving me home from school, she stopped at a stop light to hear me crooning along to "Memory" from Cats! the Musical. "Oh, thank God!" my mother reports having thought.
I bring this up because this past weekend, I had the great fortune of seeing The Jellicle Ball in New York City with one of my closest friends.
My friend Chris and me, taking the socially required selfie at the Broadhurst Theater
I've always been a Cats! apologist. It's a fun musical. It's a little incoherent to watch, but the dancing's great and who cares if it has no plot: it's a showcase of cats. But it turns out, turning Cats! into a Drag ball that honors the roots of the tradition in New York, and incorporated important and foundational queens to the New York Ballroom scene—well, it made Cats! make sense.
The show was incredible. The performers talented, the showmanship on point, the audience vocally delighted. It got me thinking about two different things:
Too frequently, people remake/revive shows just to remake/revive them. This isn't inherently a bad thing, but it was incredible to watch something that kept almost everything about the original Cats! show but let the new lens really do something transformative to the show. It wasn't trying to be the original Cats!, it was trying to enhance it, to make it say something new. As a long-time lover of this show, I came away from The Jellicle Ball going "this is the correct canonical Cats! that everyone should think about when thinking about this show." Remakes rarely outshine the originals, but this one truly knocked it out of the park.
I feel like there's this line of thought where people think that bad storytelling is giving the audience what's expected—that good stories can only subvert audience expectation, say something new, lure the audience to think one thing will happen and then make something else happen instead. There was one moment in this show I knew was coming the whole time, not because it was in the original Cats! but because the direction carefully set it up for the viewer to know what it was. I still cried when the setup was actualized. Good storytelling isn't just surprising your audience; sometimes it's giving them more feelings in seeing what they expected than they thought they'd have.
Anyway, if you're in New York, go to this show. It's a true delight.
