Monthly Archives: October 2017

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Blood and Spit into this Artwork

Blood and Spit into this Artwork.  A review of Andrew Wilmot’s “Fostering Artistic Talent” in Those Who Make Us: Canadian Creature, Myth, and Monster Stories Edited by Kaitlin Tremblay and Kelsi Morris (Exile, 2017)
By Derek Newman-Stille

We are always told that art is sacrifice and we have embedded the idea of the suffering artist into our public imagination, but what about the suffering of the tools of our art. Andrew Wilmot’s “Fostering Artistic Talent” examines morals around artistic production and the relationship between the human and animal environment. Famous artist Samael kills cephalopods to produce art, using their writhing movements and fluid bodies to spread paint and bodily fluids around on canvases. Samael does sacrifice for his art… he just doesn’t engage in personal sacrifice.

Samael de-values animal life, seeing the cephalopods he kills as disposable art tools rather than as beings worthy of life and capable of suffering. By bringing attention to the clash between Samael and animal rights advocates, Wilmot’s tale brings attention to the complexity of artistic expression and the limits of artistic expression. This is a tale that engages in debate about animal agency, animal cruelty, animal intelligence and the ethics of art, inviting readers to engage in critical questions about aesthetics and animal life. 

Wilmot purposely choses to focus his tale around animals that are generally not treated as aesthetically pleasing on their own, cephalopods, to bring attention to the critical issues around animal rights and the focus of animal rights discourse around cute animals. By including a cephalopod named Kandinsky, named after an artist itself, Wilmot brings attention to the idea of living cephalopods as art and his artist’s need to transform this beauty into his own artistic works instead of recognizing the natural beauty of the living, unmodified animal. He brings attention to human-centrism and the human conception of art as things that are modified and manipulated by us.

To find out more about the work of Andrew Wilmot, check out his site at http://andrewwilmot.ca

To find out more about Those Who Make Us, visit http://www.exileeditions.com/shop/those-who-make-us-the-exile-book-of-anthology-series-number-thirteen/

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Truths in Fiction

Truths in FictionA review of Kate Story’s “Where Will The Seas Roll Up Their Thunder” in Those Who Make Us: Canadian Creature, Myth, and Monster Stories edited by Kelsi Morris and Kaitlin Tremblay (Exile, 2016)
By Derek Newman-Stille

In “Where Will the Seas Roll Up Their Thunder”, Kate Story speaks through a voice that is underused in fiction in generally, and especially in monster stories – the voice of an older woman who lives in a long term care home. This woman is having a conversation with a student about a topic that is generally unrepresented in fiction featuring older adults – the future. Story still explores ideas of the past and nostalgia, which are firmly connected to the representation of older adults, but she connects these not to the woman’s age, but to her status as a Newfoundlander, interested in Newfoundland history.

Story captures the rambling quality of a good storyteller, willing to make connections between seemingly disparate ideas and willing to go into tangents and rants. She captures the magic of storytelling and links it to exploring the truth behind narratives. She interacts with key features of narrative like the feeling of being chosen (a theme that is over-represented in fantasy narratives) and the problematic quality of this theme and how it stems from a life that seeks significance when being underrepresented as a woman in canonical stories. Her unnamed older woman wants to have made an impact on the world around her, a significant change and not to be easily erased. She interacts with notions of truth and fiction and the assumption that older adults are indulging in fantasy if they mention the strange and unnatural rather than representing truths. Her narrator has access to truths that others ignore. She points out the interweaving of landscape and story by presenting her narrator uncovering truths located beneath the surface of the Newfoundland landscape and things hidden in plain sight.

Story blends science and fantasy in her narrative, giving a new origin story for the tales of dragons and connecting past and future in a cycle of death and rebirth. 

Story connects the skepticism of the student researcher to the possibility of truth in a narrative inside of what seems to be a folkloric story. She highlights the multiplicity of truths and points out that “truth” itself is a story, always subject to revisions and changes.

To discover more about Kate Story’s work, visit http://www.katestory.com

To discover more about Those Who Make Us, visit http://www.exileeditions.com/shop/those-who-make-us-the-exile-book-of-anthology-series-number-thirteen/

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Here Be Monsters

Here Be MonstersA review of Michal Wojcik’s “A New Bestiary” in Those Who Make Us: Canadian Creature, Myth, and Monster Stories edited by Kelsi Morris and Kaitlin Tremblay (Exile, 2016)
By Derek Newman-Stille

Michal Wojcik’s “A New Bestiary” is a posthuman tale about body modification. In this near future fiction piece, Mojcik presents a world where people are remaking themselves into monsters as a way to claim a new, non-human identity for themselves. Ranging from Centaurs to Satyrs to Merpeople to Cyclopes, these monsters are not merely evincing biological change, they are building new, resistant identities. 

However, these identities surpass medical modification and the changing of the biological start to change the world, shifting the world to a new space of monsters, a new cartography and vision for the functioning of the world. Islands begin to appear in the ocean that hadn’t existed before and the world seems to be altering itself to medieval settings in a form of vast restoration. Bodies are no longer scarred through their transformations and medical modifications, but are reborn as monsters. The medical is undone and replaced by the miraculous.

Wojcik offers a transhuman tale that questions the idea of the simple boundaries of human existence, inviting the reader to imagine the role of the monster as the ultimate outsider to challenge the simple boundaries policing human definition.

Wojcik’s narrator, Melanie, originally biologically modifies herself as a way of speaking back against resistant classifications and to gain confidence. She embraces a chimera image of assembled animal and insect parts, not wanting to limit herself to existing monster imagery, but instead to construct a new identity. But her identity isn’t just a challenge for others, it is an internalized question, an invitation for her to redefine herself and her place in a world that values normalcy even when there are possibilities for transhuman bodies. 

Wojcik’s “A New Bestiary” collides against normativity in our world, inviting us to reimagine our world and rankle at our restrictions. This is a story of home that asks how we define “home” and “belonging”. 

To discover more about Those Who Make Us, visit https://thosewhomakeus.wordpress.com

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My Schedule for Can Con 2017 (October 13-15)

My Schedule for Can Con 2017 
For those of you who are attending Can Con this weekend, here are some of the panels I will be speaking on:

Friday Evening

21:00-21:50 

Homophobia and Monster Stories

Saturday Morning

11:00-11:50

Finding a Home for Your Queer Tales

Saturday Evening 

18:00-18:50

Queer Comics

Saturday Evening

21:00-22:00

Spooning With Spoonies: Sexuality and Disability

Sunday Afternoon

13:00-13:50 

Myths You Maybe Haven’t Heard Of

And I will be doing an author reading in the Renaissance Press reading session 

Sunday Morning

10:00-10:50

I look forward to seeing and chatting with many of you at Can Con. 

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Slavic Myths and Human Monsters

A review of David Demchuk’s The Bone Mother (ChiZine, 2017)
By Derek Newman-Stille

David Demchuk’s The Bone Mother brings together snippets of strange lives into a tale that hints at connections between these individual stories and provides shadows of a larger narrative tying them together. Each of Demchuk’s tales ties in with a snapshot shown at the beginning of the story and diverts into the mythical, magical, mysterious, and monstrous. These images of the normal are interrupted by tales that Other them, transforming them into something complex and uncertain. The unexpected is a stream that runs through Demchuk’s narratives, complicating them to illustrate the way that stories always hold complex truths that are always part fiction.

The Bone Mother features fairy tales turned dark and infused with the mechanical, featuring an ever present factory standing as a symbol of industry intersecting with myth to create a landscape of smoke and shadow. Demchuk tells tales that connect the mythic to industry, proving that the mechanical can’t fully succeed in chasing the creatures of the human imagination back into the dark, and may, in fact, give them a space to thrive. The Bone Mother brings together Rusalka, ghosts, golem, mirror monsters, Baba Yaga figures, and other manifestations of Slavic myth and makes these figures into family secrets, hidden differences that dwell in the blood rather than the imagination. He ties these fairy tale figures in with circus freaks and those who defy social and biological norms, bringing out the diversity of the human form. The most dangerous quality of this mythical world is normalcy, which tries to turn everyone into simple, uncomplicated forms, denying diversity. All of these figures who could be called monsters only serve to show a mirror to humanity, illustrating that we are the monsters for trying to enforce conformity. 

To find out more about The Bone Mother, visit ChiZine Publications at http://chizinepub.com/the-bone-mother/
To discover more about David Demchuk, visit http://daviddemchuk.com/ .