[Ask the Aliens is a monthly feature on Misreader that attempts to contact aliens to answer life advice questions here on Earth. Read the open call here or check out the previous letters here. If you have a question send it to misreaderblog at gmail dot com with "Ask the Aliens" in the subject line.] Dear Aliens, Hi, aliens I hope you are doing well. Me, not so much. I have recently made a decision that now that I have made it I'm regretting very much. I don't want to go into details, mostly because you might think it's funny that I'm asking you, and also because it's pretty embarrassing to admit, even in an anonymous forum like this. Basically, it was a question about deciding to leave some
The Gods Are Dead by Joanna C. Valente (Deadly Chaps 2015) I'm From Electric Peak by Bud Smith (Artistically Declined Press* 2016) I got The Gods Are Dead and I'm From Electric Peak at the same time, at the Flapperhouse #9/ Voyager Record Pre-Launch Countdown event at Pacific Standard in late March. Joanna C. Valente read that night and Bud Smith was in the audience. I read both books on the plane that took me to LA and AWP a few days later. That's a long time ago now, but the combination has been on my mind ever since. I've talked about types of pairings before. I thought that pairing these two books would be based on chance proximity, but it turns out that they were related on much deeper
The primaries are ending today, but the elections monster still needs to be fed. No matter what shape the beast takes—be it in-the-bag newswire victory announcements or defending a man a racist meme that somehow has assumed a human form—beast got to eat. Votes are not filling enough. It will take more than that. Polls, statistics, blog posts, news reports, demonstrations, human lives: all of it will be served. All of it will pass between the teeth and wind its way down the creature's belly and, eventually, excrete. What? A winner. "The Gerry-Mander" via Wikimedia Commons.
Tel Aviv is a city of crumbling sandcastle apartments and dreams. It's also the home to two Rose Metal Press authors, one being myself, and the other is Marcela Sulak, co-editor of Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres. She was my professor and advisor, and a big part of why the Voyager Record exists. So since we share this city and these dreams, we're having a joint reading for both books on Sunday June 19 at the Dancing Camel Brewery in Tel Aviv. Please attend this event if you can. I highly recommend flying here now because we can also go to the beach.
