The inspirations and origins for our stories.
Joachim Heijndermans’s story “My Book Report on Starlight” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 17 November 2017. My family moved from the Netherlands to the USA in 1998, when I was about 8 years old. I did not speak a word of English and was terrified of the prospect of attending a school where I couldn’t talk to anyone. By a pure stroke of luck, the school I attended had another student who also spoke …
Gerald Warfield’s story “The Number of the Tribe” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 10 November 2017. I love to speculate on the origin of things, how one concept is built on another, is built on another, all the way back to—when? Mathematics should be traceable to a time when someone realized that it was useful to have more numbers than one had fingers. But the specifics of those earliest events will remain forever shrouded …
Patrick Doerksen’s story “Notes Towards a New Fairytale” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 3 November 2017. “Notes towards a New Fairtale” was written at a hinge moment in my life. I was trying to decide whether or not to go “all in” with fiction or to let myself keep dabbling and making more career-oriented lifestyle choices. I was discouraged by a number of rejections and feeling quite lost; so I wrote a story about …
Benjamin Cort’s story “Bluebird” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 27 October 2017. “Bluebird” started as a sci-fi riff on some of the early scenes of Grapes of Wrath. I imagined a cowboy of sorts with a hulking harvester monstrosity talking a family off their dusty farm so that a high tech city could make its way in. The “City” in Bluebird is inspired by another short story I wrote for an American Protest Literature …
Rob Francis’s story “Beneath the Sea of Glass” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 13 October 2017. I’ve always loved adventure fantasy since childhood, but as I got older wondered where all those stories about people seeking treasure to improve their lot in life had gone. So I created Leos and Agris to go find some! They always seem to be in debt and never really get any closer to paying the bailiffs, unfortunately, but …
David Hammond’s story “Making the List” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 6 October 2017. This story was inspired by The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert. Kolbert talks about the extinction of the Neanderthals and the idea that Homo sapiens survived by being a bit crazier than previous human species. (I don’t have a copy of the book, so I’m copying these quotes from Goodreads.) “Archaic humans like Homo erectus ‘spread like many other mammals …
