Showing posts with label Third Bear. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Third Bear. Show all posts

21 December 2010

Third Bear Carnival: The E-Book


Remember the Third Bear Carnival? Of course you do.

Well, after a lot of hard work from various folks, we now can offer all of the Carnival posts, plus some new content, as a free, downloadable e-book.

Thanks to the contributors, to Matt Staggs for doing the initial compilation, and to Jill Roberts and Elizabeth Story at Tachyon for making it all look great. And thanks to Wired.com for hosting the file!

And don't forget -- The Third Bear is always happy to go home with you...

30 August 2010

Third Bear Carnival Winner!

photo via Shorpy.com

Step right up, folks!  Dr. Eric Schaller, Prestidigator & Mime, and I, your humble host, have consulted with our oracles and soothsayers, and after centuries of deliberation, we have discovered a winner of the Win a Unique Third Bear contest.  We were amused by all the entries, and thank everyone who participated.

Congratulations are due to Alys for this contribution:
The Fourth Bear is always there, waiting just out of sight, around the corner, behind you, where you’re not looking, to snatch the only custard doughnut, or the last piece of pie. She hoards these things, as dragons do gold, in her den. She sleeps on a bed of stale pastry, and eats it in her sleep. Sometimes, children have mistaken her for a witch. She keeps her teeth and claws polished clean, but her fur is sticky with chocolate and cherry jam and other substances best not inquired into. 
(Alys, please email me your mailing address, and I will send the book to you!)

27 August 2010

Third Bear Carnival: Finale

When I came up with the idea for the Third Bear Carnival, I quickly knew one post I wanted: something by Ann VanderMeer, Jeff's wife, who first knew him as a very young and mostly-unpublished short story writer, and who was one of the first editors to publish him with any frequency.  She was Ann Kennedy back then, and it's partly the stories that put her on the path to becoming Ann VanderMeer, because in Ann Jeff found his perfect reader and his perfect love.

It took a bit of convincing for me to get Ann to write about her relationship not only to her husband, but to his stories.  Ann thinks of herself as an editor and not a writer, but she sent me a contribution back in July, and I've held onto it until now.   Much as I love what everybody else has contributed to the Carnival over these past weeks, and grateful as I am to each them ... well, this one's special...

Ann & Jeff VanderMeer

VanderMeer Stories: A Personal Reminiscence
by Ann VanderMeer

The earliest VanderMeer stories I read came from The Book of Frog, a self-published chapbook of stories that contained all manner of frogs and toads. In some stories the creatures were featured prominently, but in others, they were merely a whisper. I had to force the then young man of 20 (who was trying so hard to grow a beard) to allow me to purchase a copy (he wanted to give it to me).

“Nonsense,” I said. How will you ever be a full-time writer if you give your work away?” And then I bought five copies; perhaps one of the best investments I’ve ever made (and I am not just talking about how rare and valuable those copies are now).

I knew back then from reading those early tales that this was a writer to watch. He might find those stories sophomoric and simple, but there was a passion to the writing. And heart. And a great deal of playfulness.

He sent me stories for The Silver Web (a magazine I was publishing in the late 80’s early 90’s). One was a god-awful story about a high school girl going to her prom and some secret fantasy world hiding in her closet. I turned that one down quickly only for Jeff to tell me it was a test of my editorial taste. Yes, of course it was, I believe this. I did publish many of his stories during the years of The Web; “Heart for Lucretia” – a far future science fiction piece that fully illustrates the real sacrifice of sibling responsibilities, “Henry Dreams of Angkor Wat” – a surreal look at the horrors of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, “Black Duke Blues” – a story about a gifted musician in New Orleans (this one won him the Florida Individual Artist Grant) and “So The Dead Walk Slowly” – a zombie story long before zombies were popular. Each one more different than the last and yet so uniquely VanderMeer.

Jeff has always had a fondness for animals, as you can see from his fiction. From frogs he moved onto meerkats, then squid and now bears. He tells me that he doesn’t like talking animal stories and yet…his frogs talk. So do his meerkats. And in his latest new story, “The Quickening,” there is a talking rabbit. I think. At least, it seems to be talking (and it looks like a rabbit).

And this is his strength; writing fiction that has so many layers. When you read one of his stories you are immediately grabbed by his command of the language, the beauty of the words he puts together. You get caught up the characters and sucked right into their screwed up yet amazing lives. And it doesn’t matter if the character is a talking rabbit or a risk-taking surgeon, the president of an alternate United States or even a version of Jeff himself. Because they are all so honestly who they are. And you just gotta know what happens to them next.

When I first started reading VanderMeer, I used to hold one back. What I mean by that is I would leave one story unread until he wrote another one. Silly, I know (and it drove him crazy), but I wanted to make sure there would always be a new story for me to read. Now I am privileged to be on that short list of readers who see the work first. So all I can do is continue to encourage him, and give him the space he needs, to write the next one (‘cause I’m kinda selfish that way).

So yeah, I’ve read all the stories and I’ve read them in every version. Plus I’ve read all the stuff that didn’t go in. And when the final book (or magazine) comes out, it’s such a treat for me to sit and read the stories again just for pleasure as a reader, not an editor and not for critique or commentary. (I must have read at least 100 versions of his novel Shriek, yet when I sat down with the hardcover in my hands, I still cried when Janice considered herself so alone in the world she wished to leave it and I felt a hitch in my heart when Duncan discovered Mary’s betrayal. )

When I immerse myself into Jeff’s world through his fiction, I can’t help but be taken back to the time when I first encountered each tale. Much like listening to certain songs can take you back to the time when you first heard that song, so each of these stories is also a piece of my personal history. “The Quickening” reminds me of that trip to St. Augustine when Jeff picked up that postcard that sparked the story (he wrote the first few snippets then, making me impatient for him to write the whole damn thing so I could read it, damn it!).

“The Secret Life of Shane Hamill” takes me back to that crazy time when Jeff was doing a promotion for his book Secret Life, by writing a customized, unique secret life for each person who bought the book from Mark Ziesing (Ann, it will be easy, only about 10-12 stories – OMG why are there 200 people buying the book???). And he hand-wrote each one. Seriously ... I know because I spent hours seeking the “right” paper for him to use. And they are truly things of beauty.

I can’t read “Predecessor” without remembering when he woke me up in the middle of the night to tell me about a truly wacked-out dream. By the time I arrived at work a few hours later, there was this amazing story in my inbox. Forget about that customer whose computer system was down, I HAD to read this RIGHT NOW.

 Not all the memories are blissful, however. “Errata” takes me back to the worst time of my life. And every time I read it, I cringe and hold my breath because I know where it will go. But how can you appreciate the good times if you don’t have those dark moments, too? So I read it again ... and again. And each time the pain is a little bit less and the creativity of story overwhelms me.

And “The Situation?” Well, of course this is a version of his corporate working life before he became (thankfully) a full-time writer. I KNOW these people and he portrayed them perfectly. He might have even been too kind. So yeah, when I read this, I hear their voices, those turkey-heads. “Lost;” I remember sitting in the blue chair early one morning reading this story and my heart just going out to this poor, poor guy. And feeling a bit lost myself as my daughter was going through some rough times and I didn’t know how to help her.

“Three Days in a Border Town,” is, I believe, the last story he’s written (so far) that takes place in the same world as Veniss Underground. When I first read this I was ready for the rest of the novel. Because these are people and this is a world I want to know more about. At the time Jeff said there would be more. And maybe there will.

OK, so now this book is out. And Jeff is out of town. So this means I can sit back and relax and relive these stories once more. Heaven...

26 August 2010

Third Bear Carnival: "The Magician"

I've got one very special post saved for tomorrow, but this post will end my own contributions to the Third Bear Carnival. To bring things to a close, I recorded a reading of a very short story hidden in the Afterword to the book, called "The Magician"... (It may take a few seconds to load and buffer.)


[Direct link]

24 August 2010

Win a Unique Third Bear!

The Third Bear Carnival will come to an end later this week, and in honor of that, here's a contest.  I have a copy of Jeff VanderMeer's Third Bear collection that includes a unique cartoon by Eric Schaller, drawn on 24 July 2010.  This is the only copy of this cartoon that exists, at least as far as I know (most of Eric's cartoons are reproduced in bulk by the many small, innocent children he has imprisoned in a sweatshop deep beneath Dartmouth College).  It is drawn on the title page of the book, which in all other editions is unillustrated.

Here's how you can win this unique copy of The Third Bear:

In the comments to this post, write a description/explanation of 100 words or less about The Fourth Bear.  (Yes, we know all about the Third Bear now, but what is the Fourth Bear?)  The deadline is this Friday, August 27, at 12pm Eastern Standard Time.  Eric and I will then consult, and the entry that we agree is most interesting will be the winner.  All results are final and utterly subjective.

Barring unforseen claims upon our time, or an inability to come to an agreement (and thus the need to institute a mud-wrestling match between ourselves), we will announce the winner here on Monday, August 30.

16 August 2010

Third Bear Carnival: "The Surgeon's Tale" and "Three Days in a Border Town"

When deciding on whom to invite for the Third Bear Carnival, one person I knew I really hoped to convince to join us was Micaela Morrissette, because Jeff VanderMeer, Ann VanderMeer, and I had become aware of her short fiction at the same time -- when we read her story "Ave Maria" in Conjunctions 49 and immediately decided to reprint it for Best American Fantasy 2.  (We weren't alone in loving the story -- it won a Pushcart Prize, too!)  She has since gone on to all sorts of wonderful things, including publishing an acclaimed story in Weird Tales, "Wendigo".  My first encounter with Micaela, though, had been way back in 2005 when my story "The Art of Comedy" appeared on Web Conjunctions and Micaela helped with the layout and formatting.

And now, with Micaela writing about two of Jeff's stories, it feels like we've all come full circle!  But more importantly, here are some wonderful, and wonderfully-written, insights on Jeff's work.

(Be sure to check out the Carnival link collection, too, because folks from around the world and around the web have recently posted their contributions.  And we've still got a few more coming later...)



On "The Surgeon's Tale" and "Three Days in a Border Town"
by Micaela Morrissette

“The Surgeon’s Tale” and “Three Days in a Border Town” are both love stories, or erotic tragedies; and the universes in which the stories occur bump and rub each other in places. Each takes place in a Weird but decrepit dimension that postdates the collapse of a stronger, richer civilization. In “Three Days in a Border Town,” that past can be read as the readers’ own present, the here and now; and this creates a relevancy, a poignancy that is echoed in the despairing ache of the tone. Despair, enervated but grim, bitter, and ruthless, is everywhere in the stark, moistureless ecosystem of this reptilian narrative, in its dusty, mirage-ridden desert and crumbling border town.


03 August 2010

Third Bear Carnival: "Finding Sonoria" and "Three Days in a Border Town"

David A. Beron瓣 is Dean of Library and Academic Support Services at Plymouth State University, and author of Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels. He was instrumental in helping to organize last year's "Illustrating VanderMeer" exhibit, and so I thought he might enjoy joining our carnival. David posted this piece as a downloadable document on his website, and I asked him if he wouldn't mind my posting it here as well...



Two Stories from Jeff VanderMeer’s The Third Bear
by David A. Beron瓣

As part of a reviewing process that my friend Matt Cheney developed, I was part of a group each reading two stories from The Third Bear by Jeff VanderMeer. I chose the time when I had time travelling on a plane to read these stories. I found that a different setting (I usually read on my porch looking out over the hills in New Hampshire with the sound of birds in the background) physically took me out of my ordinary world, bound by gravity, into a unaccustomed world of different sights and sounds, which worked perfectly when I entered VanderMeer’s highly imaginative world.

In the first story, “Finding Sonoria,” a retired land surveyor, John Crake, discovers a stamp from the Republic of Sonoria from a collection he accumulated as a boy with the hope of traveling one day and discovering these distant countries. However, his stamps and his interest in travel waned as he grew older and settled for less, following a “path of least resistance.” John hires his friend Jim Bolger, an aging private detective down on his luck, to locate the Republic of Sonoria, which does not seem to exist on any map. The stamp and Sonoria become an obsession to each man. Jim, “in his little rotting house,” begins writing an imaginary history of Sonoria while John, “in the Murat Motel,” begins dreaming about Sonoria and finding a personal solace in his dreams that he is unaccustomed to having in reality.  Despite their differences, the two men share “the same world, all because of a stamp.” How both men resolve this imaginary country in their lives raises a personal question how we individually resolve the mediocrity or restricting conditions in our own lives.

Before continuing with the next story, I peeked out the window of the jet I was seated in and saw large fields in the Midwest and small groups of homes and buildings, representing an unknown town. When I sit on my porch reading and a plane passes overhead, I take a moment and think about the people in that plane and sometimes wave, though I doubt if anyone in the plane could see me from that distance.  It does not matter. I continue waving and I guess this action is more for me, claiming my own space, than for anyone else.

In the second story, “Three Days in a Border Town,” VanderMeer skillfully tells a story about a woman who is searching for her lost husband, a farmer named Delorn, who has been captured by a floating City that is “forever moving across the desert.”  With the use of the pronoun, “you,” the reader becomes closely associated with the heroine, a border guard in a small town called Haart; the strange customs in this desert border town; and her search for a “familiar,” which is a manta ray-like creature whose “tube of flesh, the umbilical,” after insertion into a host, reveals visions and knows how to find the City. We are left with uncertainty about the heroine ever finding the City and questions are raised about Delorn’s choice in leaving her. Is this a lifetime quest? The improvableness of her rediscovery of the City and Delorn brought up personal loss in my own life and I counted those losses I accepted without a second thought; those I mourned for an hour, a day, a week, a month or years, and the one that I refuse to accept and am walking aimlessly in my own desert every day.

At that moment, the pilot’s voice interrupted my thoughts on the plane and announced that we were presently flying over Kansas and, at our current distance from the ground, the temperature outside was 60 degrees below zero. I gazed out the window and was suddenly aware of my own vulnerability and the mind-boggling reality of where I was at that moment. It seemed the perfect time to continue reading Jeff VanderMeer!

31 July 2010

Third Bear Carnival: Rachel Swirsky Writes Fanfic!

The ever-marvelous Rachel Swirsky has posted her contribution to the Third Bear Carnival, "A Meta-Fictional Diptych Relating to the Stories 'Appogiatura' and 'Fixing Hanover'" (cross-posted to Alas, a Blog), which could be considered, as she notes, fan fiction. Now if only all fan fiction were like this...
Rebecca Salt, age fourteen, daughter of divorced middle class Jews from Long Island, was tired of being a Speller. She could still remember how things had felt before she got competitive, when Spelling was still a pleasure, when she had a sort of palpable sense of the l-u-x-u-r-i-a-n-c-e** of words and letters. She'd heard the symmetry between alphabet and language as a kind of ringing d-u-l-c-i-m-e-r, intricate and melodious. Sometimes the joy she took in words felt a-u-t-o-c-h-t-h-o-n-o-u-s, seeming to rise up in her from some ineffable, otherworldly source.

Six years into the rote of shuffling flash cards in every free moment, gasping out words as she ran out the door to school, eschewing the playground to snatch more time at recess and lunch, her evenings collapsing into a formless mass of homework seeping into study… well, six years into it she found herself waxing e-l-e-g-i-a-c about the days when words had seemed to sing and spin. It seemed almost s-a-c-r-i-l-e-g-i-o-u-s to admit it, but she regretted the k-n-a-c-k for words that had bound her to this labor.

Until she discovered s-m-a-r-a-g-d-i-n-e.

Read More!

29 July 2010

Brian Slattery Joins the Third Bear Carnival

The Third Bear Carnival continues, and will continue to continue over the next few weeks, I expect. The latest freakshow act contribution comes from Brian Francis Slattery, who offers some thoughts on "The Goat Variations" and "Three Days in a Border Town" over at The New Haven Review. Here's a taste:
One of the abiding pleasures of writing books, and being lucky enough to have them published, is the way in which they have led me to discover parts of the literary world I may not have discovered otherwise. Among them is a brand of science fiction and fantasy that’s been given all kinds of labels—my favorite is the New Weird—but basically boils down to books in which many strange and interesting things happen, and in which the writing is really, really good. My running favorite author in this group, which makes him one of my favorite living authors, period, is Jeff VanderMeer, a prolific and vastly talented writer perhaps best known for his books about a fantastical, decaying, and distinctly postcolonial city called Ambergris. In these books, VanderMeer displays not only an astonishingly rich imagination, but also a pretty ridiculous command of numerous fiction styles, from quasi-Borgesian to hard-boiled noir. His books are social, political, personal: everything I want in fiction. If I were the competitive type, I’d say he’s the man to beat.

19 July 2010

Third Bear Carnival: "The Third Bear"

by Eric Schaller


[This post is part of an on-going series of explorations through, investigations with, and inspirations from Jeff VanderMeer's new short story collection, The Third Bear.]




14 July 2010

Third Bear Carnival: "Shark God vs. Octopus God"

by Eric Schaller


[This post is part of an on-going series of explorations through, investigations with, and inspirations from Jeff VanderMeer's new short story collection, The Third Bear.]



13 July 2010

Third Bear Carnival: "The Quickening"

[This post is part of an on-going series of explorations through, investigations with, and inspirations from Jeff VanderMeer's new short story collection, The Third Bear.]

"The Quickening" is the one story original to The Third Bear, and it's a story that fascinates me because it is entirely composed of ambiguities.  I like ambiguities in fiction -- they respect the reader by assuming an intelligent audience that wants to be an active participant in the meaning and import of the tale.  (Speaking of awareness of the audience, I should note that this post will probably make most sense to people who have read the story.  Yet another reason for you to get the book!)

Third Bear Carnival

 



In honor of the publication of Jeff VanderMeer's new short story collection, The Third Bear, I've asked a group of writers to read a couple of stories each and create some sort of response over the next few weeks. Some of those responses will be analyses of the story, others will be personal essays, at least one will be a work of visual art, and, who knows, some folks might be inspired to create stories of their own, or poems, or movies, or stained glass windows. I've given them no limits or guidelines other than it has to be something they can either post to their own blog or I can post for them here.

I will keep updating this post with links to each entry in what I'm calling the Third Bear Carnival. If you happen to have a copy of the book, or even just of some of the stories in the book, feel free to create something of your own and link to it in the comments to this post (I'll add relevant links to the main set whenever I have the chance).

Many of the writers just received the book last week, so the Carnival is likely to be slow to start, but once we get going, I think some marvelous things will appear...