The inspirations and origins for our stories.
Sandi Leibowitz’s story “The Cypress and the Rose” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 20 April 2018. I envisioned this as a feminist re-telling of a certain familiar fairy tale, but I didn’t want that to be apparent early on. The hero’s name that came to me was Cyprus, who was a boy. Then I changed it to Cypress, and the tree and plant imagery came to me. That sounded like a girl’s name, so …
M. C. Tuggle’s story “Cathedra” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 13 April 2018. “Cathedra” is a “hard-science” story, inspired by an article in Astronomy magazine on Enceladus, the most promising site for life in our solar system. It’s a tale of faith and one’s discovery of purpose within society. The title and theme came from this anecdote: A man came upon a construction site where three people were working. He asked the first, “What …
Hamilton Perez’s story “Bye Bye Skinny Cow” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 6 April 2018. The title came first, though it wasn’t so much a title as a lament. I’d recently lost my dog, Jack (affectionately referred to as “skinny cow”) to a brain tumor, an experience completely alien to me despite growing up with all kinds of animals and having, on occasion, to say goodbye to them. But I’d never seen a seizure …
K. D. Azariah-Kribbs ’s story “The Three Sisters” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 30 March 2018. With some stories, I can remember where I was standing when I got the idea. “The Three Sisters” didn’t come to me quite so immediately, but seemed to slowly crystallize out of what I have learned from life with my wife and daughters, and about how difficult you can make things for yourself when you worry that you …
Lisa Clark’s story “Switch” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 23 March 2018. “Switch” came to me as a spin-off of the YA SF novel I’m working on called Skin Changers. In that story, juvenile offenders enter an immersive VR program as the means through which they are rehabilitated. But what if old people – people like Claudia in “Switch,” who grew up before the age of computers – could enter that type of program? …
Beston Barnett’s story “Velaya, the Dreaming City” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 16 March 2018. “Velaya” was very much inspired by Lord Dunsany, who was a writer of quirky little fantasies in the pre-Tolkien era. I had been fooling around with different voices and styles in my writing, and thought Dunsany’s high, Biblical language would be interesting to mimic. Of course, what you set out to do is never quite what you do do, …
