The Cascadia Subdu ction Z A LITERARY on QUARTERLY e January 2011 X Vol. 1. No. 1 Another Weather: Mount St Helens poem by Ursula K. Le Guin On Black Literature & Battle Flags by Sheree Renée Thomas Conversation with Chandler Davis transcribed by Josh Lukin BOOKS REVIEWED IN THIS ISSUE The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter What I Didn't See and Other Stories by Karen Joy Fowler Holiday I mmortal mmortal by M. Rickert A Cup of Normal E by Devon Monk mpress Under the Poppy by Kathe Koja Steampunk II: X Steampunk Reloaded James James edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer N 80! Memories & Reflections g on Ursula K. Le Guin edited by Karen Joy Fowler and Debbie Notkin FEATU R ED AR TIST James Ng $4.00 Managing Editor: Lew Gilchriist VOL . 1 NO. 1—JA N UA R Y 2011 Reviews Editor: Welcome to The Cascadia Subduction Zone h 3 Nisi Shawl Another Weather: Mount St Helens h 3 Features Editor: poem by Ursula K. Le Guin L. Timmel Duchamp On Black Literature & Battle Flags h 4 Arts Editor: Kath Wilham by Sheree Renée Thomas A Conversation with Chandler Davis h 5 transcribed by Josh Lukin $4.00 REVIEWS The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter h 6 reviewed by Nancy Jane Moore What I Didn't See and Other Stories by Karen Joy Fowler h 8 reviewed by L. Timmel Duchamp Holiday by M. Rickert h 15 reviewed by Carrie Devall A Cup of Normal by Devon Monk h 16 reviewed by Cynthia Ward H Under the Poppy by Kathe Koja h 17 reviewed by Rachel Swirsky 2 Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer h 18 reviewed by Liz Henry 80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin h 20 edited by Karen Joy Fowler and Debbie Notkin reviewed by Victoria Garcia FEATU R ED AR TIST James Ng h 22 © The Cascadia Subduction Zone, 2011 Subscriptions and single issues online To order by check, payable to: at: www.thecsz.com Aqueduct Press Print subscription: $15/yr; P.O. Box 95787 Print single issue: $4 Seattle, WA 98145-2787 Electronic Subscription (PDF format): [Washington State Residents $10 per year add 9.5% sales tax.] Electronic single issue: $3 In This ISSUE Cover banner collagraph of the Cascadia subduction zone by Marilyn Linden-Bode n Welcome to The Cascadia Subduction Zone Here in the Pacific Northwest, we live treats contemporary fiction. Which is to say: They ignore most of it, in the Cascadia subduction zone, with and when it comes to the narrow bandwidth of literature they do cover, massive, almost unimaginable earth- their performance is underwhelming, ‘not only meager but shockingly quakes lurking in our past and looming mediocre,’ as former LA Times Book Review director Steve Wasser- in our future. Frequently we experience man said three years ago. And it hasn’t gotten any better since then, “slow earthquakes” moving the earth leaving us with what Jennifer Weiner describes as “a disease that’s rot- beneath us, imperceptible to humans ting the relationship between readers and reviewers.” except through technology. Occasion- The relationship between readers and reviewers interests us. We ally a mountaintop blows, awing us with want to bring attention to work critics largely ignore and offer a wider, its power. The denser plate of oceanic less narrowly conceived view of the literary sphere. In short, we will crust—the Juan de Fuca Plate—is being review work that interests us, regardless of its genre or the gender of its forced deep into the Earth's interior be- author. We will blur the boundaries between critical analysis, review, neath the North American continental poetry, fiction, and visual arts. And we will do our best to offer our plate in a process known as subduction, readers a forum for discussion that takes the work of women as vital and as the plate encounters high temper- and central rather than marginal. What we see, what we talk about, atures and pressures that partially melt and how we talk about it matters. Seeing, recognizing, and under- solid rock, some of this newly formed standing is what makes the world we live in. And the world we live in magma rises toward the Earth's surface is, itself, a sort of subduction zone writ large. Pretending that the liter- to erupt, forming a chain of volcanoes ary world has not changed and is not changing is like telling oneself above the subduction zone. (Brantley, that the world is a solid, eternally stable ball of rock. 1994, Volcanoes of the United States) Hu- mans like to think of the earth as the ultimate symbol of stability: hence the cliché “down-to-earth.” But in the Cas- i cadia subduction zone, “down-to-earth” 3 necessarily means something else. To Another Weather: Mount St Helens be grounded, here, is to be ever mind- ful of the plates shifting below us, slip- ping and striking and moving magma, Weightless clouds and airy rain drift over of sloping fault lines that separate and yet merge, of one plate being inexorably a lower, slower weather in the world pushed beneath another, with enormous where lava turns in vast typhoon pavanes, consequences. thick fire beneath a ponderous earthen sky: The Cascadia Subduction Zone aims to storms brew a thousand years before they break bring reviews, criticism, interviews, in- in quaking thunder of tectonic shift telligent essays, and flashes of creative to hurl their hot bright hail straight up, send forth artwork (visual and written) to a read- the monstrous overwhelming wave, or still ership hungry for discussion of work by not only men but also women. Work by a city into feathery clouds of glass. women continually receives short (or I watch you, my volcano, through the depths at best inadequate) shrift in most re- of sunlit air, and see you snowy-flanked view publications. And yet the majority of readers are women. As Ron Hogan breathing your lazy steam-plume south, yourself writes in an August 2011 post on Bea- a vapor drifting, a bright veil of stone. trice.com, “[ Jennifer]Weiner and [ Jodi] Ursula K. Le Guin Picoult, among others, are giving us a valuable critique of a serious problem [First published in Incredible Good Fortune, Shambhala with the way the [New York] Times Publications, copyright 2007, by Ursula K. Le Guin] [Book Review]—and, frankly, most of the so-called literary establishment— n On Black Literature & Battle Flags The founder of the NAACP, Du Bois | was one of those early, testy “gatekeep- Sheree Renée Thomas ers,” the self-appointed guardians of the black image. During the Harlem Re- Sheree Renée Thomas is an award-winning poet, writer, editor, and naissance she helped shepherd, our be- publisher known especially for her Dark Matter series, a collection of loved Zora Neale Hurston, among other some of the best science fiction, fantasy, and horror produced by peo- artists, barely managed to escape his ple of African descent. She is currently working on Dark Matter III, critical gaze unscathed. Hurston referred tentatively named Dark Matter: Africa Rising. Thomas is the publisher to Du Bois as “The Dean of American of Wanganegresse Press and has contributed to national publications Negro Artists” and his fellow black gate- including the Washington Post Book Word, Black Issues Book Review, keepers as “The Niggerati,” but satirist QBR, and Hip Mama. She is a native of Memphis, Tennessee, and George Schuyler, the author of the sci- she now lives in New York City. ence fiction novels,Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful A friend recently called to ask me Workings of Science in the Land of the Free about my thoughts on the “state of and Black Empire (the successful retak- black literature” for an article she was ing of Africa from European colonial writing. When she called, I smiled and powers) was less generous to the author glanced at my calendar, thinking, “Is it who gave us The Souls of Black Folk. The that time again?” As serious as a State of character, Dr. Shakespeare Agamem- the Union address, this topic is one that non Beard, head of the “National Social is raised like clockwork among various Equality League,” was Schuyler’s very circles, some public and some otherwise. thinly disguised caricature of W.E.B. Its effect is like a battle flag, a call to ac- Du Bois. In his 1926 Nation article, “The tion. And no matter where your loyalties Negro Art Hokum,” Schuyler chal- lie, whether you think “the state of black lenged the very idea of black art, a stance H literature” is headed to hell in a hand that propelled him into the public eye basket, our literary legacy bamboozled and into a lively debate of the Harlem 4 by the boobtube, hoodwinked by hip Renaissance. Eschewing Du Bois’ idea hop, or if you think we’re in the midst of “a talented tenth,” Schuyler frowned of an exciting new renaissance, you are upon the NAACP founder’s attempts asked to weigh in—and be prepared to to define and safeguard a literary black cite and defend your sources. I’ve come canon. Du Bois believed the roads to the to think of it as an awkward but neces- ballot box, the union hall, and the office sary communal ritual, one that involves were blocked off to black people, but two a powerful praisesong of those that paths remained: the arts and letters. For “Although it’s often came before, a brief, furtive nod toward Du Bois, literature was the language of discussed as if it’s a the future, and a literary beat-down of black freedom, and he worked to guard conversation that is the writers who are trying to carve out it fiercely, supporting some artists while wholly new, truth is, careers in the present, declining read- shunning others who did not meet his we’ve been discuss- ership notwithstanding.