Reading, Viewing, and Listening
By LaToya Jordan
Read:
Amari and the Night Brothers by B.B. Alston
I read this with my 10-year-old daughter. It’s very exciting to share
a love of fantasy and sci-fi with her, and I love finding books with young
protagonists she identifies with. Amari is a 13-year-old Black girl who wants
to find her missing brother. Most people think he’s dead, but Amari gets a
special message that sets her off on an adventure at a summer camp for the
supernatural that introduces her to a world where all the magical creatures
people think are fake do exist.
I didn’t read as many novels as I wanted to this year because the pandemic stole my attention span for long-form fiction. I’m hoping this is temporary though I’m enjoying my deep dive into short stories.
One Story
I bought a subscription to One Story, a literary journal that publishes one story a month, during the pandemic. I enjoy receiving my monthly chapbook instead of junk mail. The issues fit in my purse and are the perfect companion for my commute to work. I haven’t read all this year’s issues yet, but my favorite story so far was Issue No. 290, “From the Comfort of Your Own Home” by Lincoln Michel. I read this one by flashlight on a camping trip with my daughter’s Girl Scout Troop. It’s a horror story told in email format about a virtual reality writing residency gone creepy. I do not recommend reading this at night or when camping. I also caught up on issues from 2021 I hadn’t yet read. I keep returning to Issue No. 283 “Naturale” by Carrie R. Moore. The story is about how a woman deals with who she becomes dealing with her pregnancy and her husband’s affair. I’ve read it at least three times this year because the writer does an amazing job at backstory and moving through the past and present in a short story.
Tiny Nightmares: Very Short Stories of Horrorby Lincoln Michel & Nadxieli Nieto
This collection of flash horror was weird, creepy, and scary. So many good stories in the collection but as a New Yorker, “Carbon Footprint” by Shelly Oria, stuck with me. It’s about a way to prevent the destruction of the Earth by mass murder via pushing people off subway platforms to thin the herd. As a mom who’s made mom friends online, “Human Milk for Human Babies” by Lindsay King-Miller made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It’s about mothers who cultivate an online relationship with one donating breast milk to the other in need that ends up with a bad outcome for one of the mothers when they meet in real life.
Uncanny Magazine
I love the stories in Uncanny and I hope to be published there one day. I enjoyed "Our Love against US" by DaVaun Sanders in Issue
Forty-Eight. One of my favorite lines from the story is “It’s using our love
against us.” Even though it sounds painful, I love the idea of an alien
parasite spreading via love.
Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories
I’ve read “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House, but since I’ve been writing sci-fi and horror, I felt it was my duty to read more of her work. I especially enjoyed the uncollected and unpublished stories.
Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping by Matthew Salesses
Even though I’m no longer involved in traditional writing workshops, this book caught my attention for how teachers and writers need to rethink teaching craft to reach writers with diverse backgrounds.
There are so many dog-eared pages in my copy of the book, especially in the back section with 34 revision exercises. I’m currently using two to help revise a short story I’ve been having trouble with.
Watch:
I’m not ashamed to admit I love TV.
Paper Girls, Amazon
This series features many of my favorite things: the 80s, the 90s, girl protagonists, and time travel. It’s about four newspaper delivery girls who end up caught in a battle between people from the future. The girls end up time traveling to the 90s and meet their future selves as they work to figure out how to get back to their timeline. Watching the girls — who had high hopes and plans for their futures — meet the adult versions of themselves and reckon with dashed dreams made this a poignant coming of age vignettes for each girl. There’s a lot of cursing in the show, but more cursing from me after I learned Amazon didn’t renew the series for a second season. Since it’s based on a comic book series, I picked up the complete story collection, issues 1-30, for me and my daughter to read together.
Stranger Things, Netflix
Paper Girls led us to watching Stranger Things. My family (minus my four-year-old) finished all four seasons in about a month. This sci-fi and horror series has 80s pop culture, the paranormal, secret government experiments, and has become a new cult classic. I was drawn to the series because it reminded me of Stephen King books. My least favorite season was 3 because it veered more towards gross horror with exploding rats.
Travelers, Netflix
Another series about time travel. A team of “travelers” from a
post-apocalyptic future world travel back to our present day to complete
missions to try to alter the course of humans destroying their future. The way
they time travel is by sending their consciousness into present-day people at
the exact date and time of deaths. Travelers need to pretend to be their host.
Unfortunately, the show went the way of most popular Netflix series and was
canceled by the streamer.
Wednesday, Netflix
A dark and funny series featuring Wednesday Addams investigating murders in the town where she attends school. It was great to share with my daughter and have the Wednesday I grew up with from the 90s (Christina Ricci) as a character in the series.
White Lotus, HBO Max
It’s not sci-fi, but I like to think of it as fantasy since it’s about the
lives of rich people at a luxury resort, with a dash of murder.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
I went to see Everything Everywhere All at Once twice in the theaters. As background, I’m not a fan of going to the movies. I prefer watching movies in the comfort of my home. But this movie hit every mark for me: sci-fi, weird (hot dog fingers, a raccoon chef, and butt plugs), female lead, and the exploration of a mother-daughter relationship and a husband-wife relationship. Experiencing the movie in the theater the first time was a profound experience and made me realize why people enjoy going to the movies. I remember looking over at the woman seated next to me who was crying when I was crying, laughing when I was laughing. At the end of the movie, I wanted to know who wrote it (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert and aka The Daniels) because it is the type of exploration of motherhood I want to write. This will be a movie I rewatch with my daughter when she’s a teenager.
Listen:
Ursa Short Fiction Podcast
Ursa is a podcast dedicated to short fiction by underrepresented writers co-hosted by Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, and Dawnie Walton, author of The Final Revival of Opal & Nev. The podcast features short stories and interviews with short story writers. I especially loved the “Book Club: The Secret Lives of Church Ladies” episode where Dawnie interviews Deesha about her debut short story collection to mark the two-year anniversary of the book being published.
Lofi Girl on YouTube
This is my go-to when I’m doing personal writing or writing for my day job. Lofi hip hop with no vocals and the animated girl who sits at her desk continuously writing while her cat looks out the window makes me feel like I’m having a virtual writing date.
LaToya Jordan is a writer from Brooklyn, NY. Her work has appeared in Anomaly, Literary Mama, Shirley Magazine, Mom Egg Review, Raising Mothers, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, and more. Her flash story “Offering” was a spotlight story in Best Small Fictions 2021 and named in Wigleaf’s Top 50 2021. Her essay “The Zig Zag Mother,” appears in My Caesarean: Twenty-One Mothers on the C-Section Experience and After and another essay, “After Striking a Fixed Object,” published by The Manifest-Station, was notable in Best American Essays 2016. She is also the author of a poetry chapbook, Thick-Skinned Sugar. Aqueduct Press will be releasing her novella To the Woman in the Pink Hat as a volume in the Conversation Pieces series in March 2023. Follow her on Twitter @latoyadjordan.
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