Writing's Writing by Rebecca Ore

 

I'm pleased to announce the release of Writing's Writing, a book of memoirs and poetry by Rebecca Ore, the ninety-ninth volume in our Conversation Pieces series. It is available in both print and e-book editions from Aqueduct Press here:  https://www.aqueductpress.com/books/978-1-61976-284-8.php.

  In Writing's Writing, Rebecca Ore engages in what she calls "fishing in memory," in which strange short scenes float up, things forgotten for decades, linking to names and to scenes she has to thread with words to connect them. Memory never delivers everything it holds along a particular thread of words, but it can tell a tale. Ore knows that someone else from those days might see her thread of words as only one link in a different narrative of those times. Her memoir is personal, and it reflects and reflects on how she herself changes over time.

You can read a sample here:  https://www.aqueductpress.com/books/samples/978-1-61976-284-8.pdf

Advance Praise 

"With Writing's Writing, Rebecca Ore takes us back to the 20th century, to life as a woman in the southern United States and life as a poet in New York City, to life as a student, a writer, a teacher, a person — to life. In memoir, prose, and poetry, she evokes a lost world, maybe even an alien world, with exactness and without rosy nostalgia. I caught my breath on the vertiginous sweep of some sentences. In this book, Ore returns to us a writer we might otherwise have lost: Rebecca Brown, a young poet who deserves to be heard and remembered." —Matthew Cheney, author of Changes in the Land and The Last Vanishing Man and Other Stories

 "I first noticed Rebecca Ore when her first SF novel came out: Becoming Alien. I liked it a lot, and I liked the two sequels. I have all three in my bookcase, carried safely through many moves. Ore is a fine, intelligent, individual writer, who covers topics not usually covered in SF: for example – in the Alien Trilogy and her stand-alone novel Slow Funeral -- life among working and middle-class whites in the American South. Slow Funeral uses magic as a metaphor for class power in the South. I found it amazing. 

"The longest essay in this book is a kind of autobiography: how Ore became a fiction writer through living in the rural South as a child, then in New York City as an aspiring poet, working clerical day jobs and going to poetry readings at night.  She moved on to the poetry scene in San Francisco, then back to the rural South. Those moves and her experiences explain how she has such  a good sense of regional and class differences. A lot of SF is about disjunction, about reality that is in some way broken or uncertain. It helps if your own life has taught you are there is more than one kind of reality. You learn about sexism working clerical jobs and going to poetry readings, if you didn’t know about it before. (Men often dominate at readings and on the job. Or did in the 60s and 70s and…) The difference between how you are regarded and what you want to be is another disjunction.

"The. second essay is about a bicycle tour of New Jersey. I haven’t figured out why I like it, but I do. The bicycle tour was hard work and not entirely safe, since Ore was riding alone. She describes her stops and the people she met. As is true of her other work, she has a good sense of the variety of people in the US.  Finally, there is some of her poetry. Ore was not moving among amateur poets. She knew Diane Wakoski and Gary Snyder, people I have admired from afar and who are major American poets. Though Snyder seems to have lasted better than Wakoski. (Women artists often fade from history and are discovered later.) Ore’s work was being done among professionals. 

"All in all, this chapbook tells you interesting things about an interesting writer. If you haven’t read her other books, find them and read them. Aqueduct has brought out new e-versions."--Eleanor Arnason, author of Ring of Swords and Hwarhath Stories
    . 

Celeste Rita Baker: sunrise to sundown with an everlasting rainbow sprinkled with orange

 

Celeste Rita Baker

7/28/1958-10/30/2025

sunrise to sundown with an everlasting rainbow sprinkled with orange

by Cesi Davidson

 

 

FOR THE RECORD

Celeste Rita Baker was a Virgin Islander living in Charlotte, North Carolina. Baker's genres include fantasy, speculative fiction, and magical realism in which she writes in Caribbean dialect and standard English. Her first short story, The Dreamprice” a humorous piece and dialect about gossip and favors was published by the Caribbean writer. It gave her the courage to continue submitting her short stories for publication. She won the world fantasy short story award in 2021 for “Glass Bottle Dancer” a lighthearted story about finding that thing that puts a smile on your face. It was published in dialect by Lightspeed and landed her on the front page of the Virgin Islands Daily News. It was translated into Mandarin by the Chinese publisher, Science Fiction World. “Single Entry,” about Earth participating in a Carnival parade and Rock Feather Shell, about a little boy who was turned into a turtle, were very proud accomplishments given their publication in the Virgin Islands’ Moko Magazine. Celeste would say, “It was always nice to be recognized by your own.”

The short story “Dip and Roll” about seaside rocks experiencing an earthquake was narrated with eight different voices by voice actor, Derrick O’Neal for the publishers, Podcastle. Two versions of her story “Name Calling” were published by Abyss & Apex, one in full dialect, and one edited for “easy reading.” The story raised controversy in the science fiction community centered around authenticity versus clarity. Celeste called it watering down. She likened it to putting ice in her rum. Tobias Bucknell and Amal El-Mohar publicly came to her defense, further enhancing her determination not to limit herself to standard American English. She was proud to write as the story dictated. One of her most absurd satiric stories was written in standard English American English, “Pedestals, Proclivities and Perpetuities” and published in Fantasy and Science Fiction. Her work has been published by African Voices, NYU’s Calabash, Strange Horizons, Khoreo, Instant Noodles, Tree and Stone and Margins Magical Realism. Her work has also been included in the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021, People of Colo(u)r Destroy Fantasy, An Alphabet of Book of World Sci-fi 4. She was a graduate of Clarion West Science Fiction Writers Workshop and a proud member of Harlem Writers United. Back, Belly and Side, her book of short stories, is published by Aqueduct Press.

 

IN HER OWN WORDS

Inspirations

The first time I saw myself--A Black Caribbean Woman--in print was in Merle Collin’s novel Angel. I stood in the store holding the book to me chest, panting, tearing burning eyes me eyes. I was.

 I'm grateful for and loved the work of Octavia Butler. Ms. Butler brought me to a world of science where I was.

 

The Virgin Islands

My family is from the Virgin Islands, Saint Thomas and Saint John. I was born in New York City but “came to know meself” on Saint Thomas, learned to talk there and enjoyed my childhood. I returned to New York when I was twelve years old and that affected me and that I realized that I used to be and now I wasn't.

 

Harlem NYC

I moved back and forth from Saint Thomas to the States numerous times but lived in Harlem for almost 30 years. I loved it. I couldn't keep up with all the things to see, do, and learn. I especially learned that whatever you're into, you can find other people doing it too, and doing it in that trend-setting way that Harlem is known for. I found the incredible Sheree Renee Thomas, my writing teacher and mentor at Fred Hudson's Frederick Douglass Creative Art Center in Harlem.

 

FROM MY HEART

Everyone should be so fortunate to have at least one forever friend in their lifetime. Someone to walk down the street with as you talk and chat and chat and talk about everything and nothing. When Celeste and I did our walk talk chats across 125^th Street in Harlem she wore her favorite color orange. I wore my favorite color of the day. We took a breath and those steps. Me self you self is good.

The Pleasure of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2025, pt. 27: Arrate Hidalgo

 

One Book, One Videogame, One Band

by Arrate Hidalgo 

 

2025 has been a year. I find it impossible to summarize it in a way that may sufficiently acknowledge the horrors and the joys of it. But 2025 has been a year in which I have been alive and fortunate enough to enjoy books, videogames, music. Here are three samples.

 

One Book

Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane

“To celebrate the lexis of landscape is not nostalgic, but urgent,” says Macfarlane in the introduction to this rich, vibrating word-horde, in which he provides a loving journey through nature writing and the role that this —some would say very British— genre has had in shaping the imagination of landscape by humans and their relationship with it. Interspersed with these in-depth looks at works of literature, Macfarlane includes, divided into landscape families —e.g. waterlands, woodlands, edgelands—, glossaries with hundreds of words he has collected, either found, learned or gifted, in a variety of the languages and speeches of the British Isles, most of which share the quality of being incredibly evocative and lyrical, sometimes comical, in their precision. Just two examples, if you’re curious:

rionnach maoim: shadows cast on the moorland by clouds moving across the sky on a bright and windy day (Gaelic)

squatted, squat-up: splashed with mud by a passing vehicle (Kent, north Staffordshire)

Macfarlane argues, and I agree, that while being able to name does not mean to understand, to use language well is “a species of attention,” one that is key for us not to lose our sense of place and, in the process, of ourselves.

 

One Videogame

The Longing by Anselm Pyta and Studio Seufz

Inspired by a German legend about a king that sleeps underground for thousands of years and the dwarf that must check on him once every century, The Longing is an exploration of solitude, empathy, and the passage of time. In it, we will follow the Shade, a lonely creature born to serve an ancient king, who goes to sleep with the order of being woken after 400 days have passed. These 400 days are actual, real-life days, which will begin passing the moment you start the game and will not pause even when you close it to get on with your real-world duties. You may choose to let the Shade wait it out and wake the king after a bit over a year, or you may decide to let the Shade wander and explore the underground land in which they must wait, and, in that way, bring some variety into their life. This will lead the Shade to discover the tunnels surrounding them and even find trinkets with which to decorate their otherwise bare little cave-room. The pace is such that, in my case, I ended up developing a sort of quiet companionship with the Shade. They would sit in their armchair reading —actual books! such as Moby Dick (you can read the whole thing, and many others, within the game)—, and I would do my work, translating, sending invoices, or whatnot, while the Shade would sometimes muse about boredom and the possibility of a world beyond. The art, the melancholy dungeon synth soundtrack, the writing — it all contributes to a wistful, intimate experience I have rarely found in any other medium.

 

One Band

Castle Rat

Often described as “a Dungeons & Dragons fever dream,” Brooklyn-based Castle Rat provide traditional doom and heavy metal sounds and visuals of a quality and earnestness that are absolutely disarming. Chain-mail bikinis, Conan-coded swords, plague-doctor masks — Castle Rat has it all, combined with skull-rattling doom riffs and powerful vocals —by frontwoman and “Rat Queen” Riley Pinkerton—, which must be experienced live. The band not only has created an entire epic sword and sorcery narrative that they perform between songs —which at times will have the audience pointing and possibly yelling “It’s behind you!” (picture a medieval-themed fantasy play with a mosh pit)—, but also they just sound really good. Try “Cry for Me” for a power ballad “for grave side regrets and moonlight laments,” according to the band, with an accompanying video filmed entirely in VHS.

 

  

 

Among other things,  Arrate Hidalgo is Associate Editor at Aqueduct Press. She is also an English to Spanish translator, a founder and organizer of a feminist sf con, and an amateur singer. Visit her website at arratehidalgo.com. Her English-language translation of the Basque science fiction classic, Memories of Tomorrow, by Mayi Pelot, was released by Aqueduct Press in 2022 as a volume in Aqueduct's Heirloom Book series.