Holly Wade Matter's The Circus, the Garden (and Mario Lanza)

 

Will you look at that! Aqueduct Press has just released its one hundredth volume! And that hundredth volume is Holly Wade Matter's The Circus, the Garden (and Mario Lanza)! (And yes, I used exclamation points three sentences in a row. Likely a first for me. I guess I'm just amazed that we did that.) 

 Holly's novella gives us a delightful story from the McBride family's world. It's available now in both print and e-book editions from Aqueduct Press at www.aqueductpress.com. You can read a sample from the book here:  https://www.aqueductpress.com/books/samples/978-1-61976-288-6.pdf

 

Mollie McBride, whose passions are gardening and Mario Lanza, would rather do anything than attend the Delta Zeta Spring Formal—especially after one of her sorority sisters threatens to spread damaging gossip about her. When her elephant-trainer uncle comes to town, she defies her cold, status-conscious mother, snubs the Delta Zetas, and goes to the circus. Over the course of “The Loveliest Night of the Year,” she learns that terrible secrets lurk in her family's past. Returning home, she faces her mother and confronts the stakes for her future.

Advance Praise

“Holly Wade Matter is one of the finest writers I've ever read. In The Circus, the Garden (and Mario Lanza), she returns to the world of Damned Pretty Things, and I couldn't be happier.”
 —Cynthia Ward, author of The Boodthirsty Agent series and co-author of Writing the Other: A Practical Approach

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2025, pt. 18: Holly Wade Matter

 

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening – 2025

by Holly Wade Matter

 

 

 

Viewed

Hoopla, courtesy of the Seattle Public Library, has been a boon. I was able to re-watch the 2002 production of The Forsyte Saga on a Binge Pass. Damian Lewis as Soames Forsyte is a wonder – impossible to like, impossible to ignore.  

On Netflix, 2025 was the Year of the Subtitle. I greatly enjoyed The Empress, a fictionalized series about the early years of Empress Elizabeth of Austria; The Lady’s Companion, about a chaperone in 19^th- century Spain and her trio of troublesome charges; and The Law According to Lidia Poët, a highly-fictionalized but terribly fun and sexy series about Italy’s first woman attorney.

Very recently I’ve been entertained and impressed by several Nordic noirs – The Glass Dome, The Are Murders, and Deadwind.

Late in the game, I finally got around to watching KPop Demon Hunters. You don’t have to be a fan of K-Pop and K-Drama to enjoy this, but it sure does help.

 

Listened

KPop Demon Hunters inspired me to revisit several South Korean girl bands whose music I particularly enjoy: SNSD (Girls’ Generation), 2NE1, and f(x). SNSD is pure pop, whereas 2NE1 is grittier and f(x) more introspective.

 

Read

Standouts for me this year are The Blue Castle, a remarkably mature novel by Lucy Maud Montgomery, about a young woman who, given to understand that she only has a year to live,  persuades the town eccentric to marry her. 

Carter Beats the Devil, by Glen David Gold, about a master magician, feels like magic realism, especially the descriptions of Carter’s illusions. Cameos in the novel include Houdini, Warren G. Harding, and the Marx Brothers.

The Botanical Shakespeare by Gerit Quealy, beautifully illustrated by Sumie Hasegawa-Collins, is a chocolate-box book filled with all the plants that appear in Shakespeare’s work. 

 

Other chocolate-box books are Perfumes: The A-Z Guide and Perfumes: The Guide, by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez. The authors review and rate a prodigious number of perfumes – 1,200 scents in the first volume alone. The cumulative page count is over 800. The authors are not only engaging and informative, but they’re funny as hell, too.

And, to return to the beginning, I am currently reading The Man of Property, the first volume of John Galsworthy’s Forsyte novels.

 

 

 Holly Wade Matter's debut novel, Damned Pretty Things, was released in 2020 by Aqueduct Press. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, Century, and the Bending the Landscape anthology series. She is a graduate of the University of Washington and of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. She has twice been awarded literary funding from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, and in 1998 she received a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Aqueduct will be publishing her novella "The Circus, the Garden, (and Mario Lanza)" in 2026. She lives in Seattle with her husband Brad and two house rabbits.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2024, pt.9: Holly Wade Matter

 

 

 

2024 Pleasures

by Holly Wade Matter

 

 

 

Something(s) old:      

Of late, I have been reacquainting myself with Pretenders II, an LP my college roommate owned but I did not. (As such, since it didn’t accompany me through the intervening decades, the record is tied to that specific time and place.) I remember being disappointed in it the first time I heard it. Several songs struck me as too soft. I wanted the tough Chrissie Hynde from the first album.

 Now, as I’m growing more familiar with the material, I am finding beauty in the soft songs: “Birds of Paradise,” “I Go to Sleep,” and especially the sorrowful “English Roses.” Yet the standout track for me is “Louie Louie” (no relation to the original), where Chrissie Hynde’s lyrics are at their best.

 

Courtesy of the Seattle Public Library and Kanopy, I have recently begun to reacquaint  myself with the BBC Shakespeare series from the late seventies/early eighties. The production values are low, as is the video quality, but some of the actors are top notch: Helen Mirren as Rosalind and Angharad Rees as Celia in As You Like It, Derek Jacobi brilliant as both Richard II and Hamlet, Felicity Kendal as Viola in Twelfth Night, and Cherie Lunghi and Robert Lindsay as the perfect bickering pair in Much Ado About Nothing. It’s always exciting to see how different actors interpret Shakespeare’s characters.

 

Something(s) new:

Speaking of Shakespeare, I recently read a lovely book called Shakespeare: the Man Who Pays the Rent. It’s a book of interviews between Brendan O’Hea and Judi Dench. Judi tells wonderful stories of playing various of Shakespeare’s women over the decades. The book is entertaining as hell and helped me consider Shakespeare’s women in a new light.

 

The past two years have been banner years for Nisi Shawl. Their fantasy, Speculation, came out in 2023. It’s a purely delightful tale of childhood, ghosts, and a magic pair of glasses.

 

Kinning takes over where Everfair ended, reuniting the reader with familiar characters, primarily Tink and his doctor sister, Bee-Lung. The siblings have a mission: to distribute Spirit Medicine - spores that generate deep empathy (kinning) - among couples and groups. There is derring-do, espionage, and an exceptional scene involving a stalled biplane.

 

Nisi’s most recent offering, The Day & Night Books of Mardou Fox, consists of the journals of the main character – first as a child, later as a Beat poet, story writer, and children’s book author. Mardou, Black and a woman, learns how to navigate the mostly white and male Beat culture. At the same time, she explores her magical ability to slip back and forth “over the fence,” which she first experienced as a child.

 

Something borrowed and something blue:

While researching background for a novella, I checked out Songs of the British Music Hall from the Seattle Public Library

 Compiled by Peter Davison and published in 1971, this history of songs and the singers who popularized them is accompanied by sheet music. Some of the songs are suggestive, if not outright bawdy. Such songs were referred to by the artistes as “cerulean.” The book is an exciting glimpse into Music Hall and its culture and influence (which persists to this day in rock and roll).

 

 Holly Wade Matter's debut novel, Damned Pretty Things, was released in 2020 by Aqueduct Press. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, Century, and the Bending the Landscape anthology series. She is a graduate of the University of Washington and of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. She has twice been awarded literary funding from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, and in 1998 she received a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Seattle with her husband Brad and two house rabbits.

 

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2023, pt. 11: Holly Wade Matter

 

 

Pleasures of 2023

by Holly Wade Matter

 

 

 

 

 

Read:

Knife Witch by Susan DiRende

In Susan DiRende’s debut fantasy novel, seagoing raiders, establishment witches, an evil Emperor, a volcano, and a lovelorn kraken put the heroine, the Knife Witch, through her paces and goad her, much to her annoyance, to evolve and reveal her true nature and power. An inveterate pantser, the Knife Witch (whose name is revealed only near the end of the novel) eschews plans and goes by her gut instinct and her fortunate trait of itching when danger is near. With every setback she encounters, she powers herself through with a philosophical "Be as must be." She gathers around her a small family of outcasts who have, each in their own way, a unique power to add to the magical stew.

Knife Witch was a fun read, rich in unique detail and escapades. And if the characters didn't exactly have a riotous good time, this reader did.

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

When this novel was first recommend to me by my  well-read neighbor, I imagined it was a contemporary fantasy book. It took a few paragraphs for me to catch on that it was a reimagining of David Copperfield. Kingsolver, like Dickens, is masterful at depicting children in peril. Demon (born Damon) has to endure a drug-addict mother, a brutal stepfather, forced labor on a tobacco farm, and more travails before reaching the safety of Coach Winfield and his daughter Angus. Demon achieves glory on the high school football team, only to injure himself in the game. From that point, he is pulled into the sad world of drug addiction, in the company of fellow addicts. 

The book is beautifully written and harrowing. The stand-out scene, for me, is the storm and the confrontation between the rough equivalents of Dickens’s Ham and Steerforth. I know that scene will stay with me for a long time.

(A friend who claims David Copperfield as his favorite novel said that Demon Copperhead left him feeling depressed, whereas David Copperfield left him with a spring in his step. I understand ) 

 

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

After finishing Demon Copperhead, and while it was still fresh in my mind, I hied me hence to Project Gutenburg for an ebook copy of David Copperfield. I hadn’t read it in many, many years, so much of it was as new to me as if I’d never read it at all. 

This was a satisfying three-day read, and it kept my attention sharp throughout its 64 chapters. Unique characters abounded, as one would expect from a Dickens novel, and I was pleasantly surprised by the tenderness and compassion with which Dickens portrayed the novel’s two “fallen” women (and one suspected of being on the brink). 

Also, as I read, I wondered who was the biggest villain – Murdstone and his sister, Steerforth, or Uriah Heep. I’m still undecided.

Listened:

Lindstrom, “Little Drummer Boy”

If you have to lose the “Little Drummer Boy” challenge (which is probably inevitable), and you’re not fond of the Bing Crosby/David Bowie duet, you could do worse than to listen to Lindstrom’s 43-minute-long version. My youngest brother turned me on to this. The first time he heard it, he was on a long night drive through Oklahoma. I imagined the drum beat as measured as broken white lines on the highway, and enough development of the music to keep him interested and alert.

The begins with a sequence of old-school synthesizer bleeps and bloops. That drumbeat comes in at 1:15 minutes, growing louder and more distinct. The familiar melody joins the party about 3 minutes in, and more than halfway through, a ghostly chorus joins, sounding as if they are coming through long distance on an old rotary phone. The music builds to a crashing crescendo before abruptly halting.

  
Viewed: 

Late Autumn

Let me preface this by stating that this movie is one of my top three favorites, and that it is nearly impossible to get a hold of anymore. It was once available on Netflix, which must have been where I saw it first. Happily, I managed to score a legit Blu Ray copy from a dealer in Kuala Lumpur.

Late Autumn (2010) is a joint South Korean/Chinese/United States production set in Seattle, directed by Kim Tae-yong and starring Hyun Bin as Hoon and Tang Wei as Anna. The third star of the movie is Seattle itself, portrayed in all its grey drizzling beauty. Scenes are shot at the Pike Place Market, on a Ride the Ducks tour, and the Seattle Center Fun Forest (as it is being dismantled). It is the most beautiful film depiction of the city that I’ve ever seen.

Anna, an immigrant from China, is a battered wife who accidentally kills her husband when he finds out she’s in contact with her ex-boyfriend. She has been in prison for manslaughter for an unspecified time when she receives a call from family. Her mother has died. She is granted 70 hours parole to go to Seattle for her mother’s funeral. On the bus she meets Hoon, a young South Korean man who supports himself as a gigolo. She lends him $30 for his bus ticket, and he gives her his expensive watch until he can pay her back. Hoon is on the run from the husband of one of his clients. He is playful, unconcerned, and he enjoys flirting with Anna.

Anna, on the other hand, is so reserved that nothing changes the wary expression on her face. she barely speaks, even when among her family. 

Anna and Hoon meet up again, and Hoon proposes that he show Anna the sights. Anna at last catches Hoon’s playfulness. From then on, their identities and stories become mutable. In a restaurant after the funeral, Anna’s ex-boyfriend and his young family are present. Hoon spins a story about running a restaurant in China where Anna works as a waitress. Anna plays along, even when a fight erupts between the two men.

At the end of her 70-hour parole, Anna boards the bus that will take her back to prison. Hoon joins her, and they play that they are meeting for the first time. The ambiguous end of the movie, when Anna is finally released from prison, shows Anna has retained that sense of play that Hoon awakened in her.

 

Holly Wade Matter's debut novel, Damned Pretty Things, was released in 2020 by Aqueduct Press. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, Century, and the Bending the Landscape anthology series. She is a graduate of the University of Washington and of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. She has twice been awarded literary funding from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, and in 1998 she received a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Seattle with her husband Brad and two house rabbits.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2022, pt. 12: Holly Wade Matter

 

2022 Reading Pleasures

by Holly Wade Matter

 

2022 was another year when I read selectively in between knitting projects. I thoroughly enjoyed all of the fiction below, and look forward to becoming better acquainted with other works from these authors.

 

Cabinet of Wrath: A Doll Collection, by Tara Campbell, is a story collection about the inner (and outer) lives of discarded dolls, a marionette, and a body-snatching skull-and-crossbones ring. The stories range from spooky, to bizarre, to fiction of the absurd. You may not look at your childhood toys in the same way.  

 

For the Good of the Realm, by Nancy Jane Moore, follows the adventures of two swordswomen of the Queen’s Guard as they navigate forbidden magic, political intrigue, and a growing affinity for two members of the rival King’s Guard.

 

Wishlist by Amanda Pampuro comprises a novella and two short stories, featuring a time-traveling trapeze artist, a pair of childhood enemies who grow into love on a space colony, and the refining of the personality of an AI in its years-long relationship to a young shopper. 

 

In Hastur’s Canvass by Remco van Straten, H. P. Lovecraft ‘s mythos meets Vincent van Gogh. The story skirts the line between truth and fiction, even including an episode in the life of the author. The novella is illustrated richly by  van Straten in the styles of Aubrey Beardsley, van Gogh, and more.

 

On Silent Wings, a chapbook  by Remco van Straten and Angeline Adams, (available free with a subscription to their Turnip Lanterns newsletter) includes five stories about the characters first met in The Red Man and Others. One story, written in calligraphy, includes illustrations by van Straten.

 

A Stream to Follow by Jess Wright, is part thriller, part love story, about a WWII battlefront surgeon with PTSD who returns to his home town in Pennsylvania. Things in the town and in his family are not quite right, and he misses his lover, a British aristocrat who shares his passion for fly fishing.

 

I also did some comfort reading, losing myself in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and Wives and Daughters – twice each! and rereading The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. 

 

 

Holly Wade Matter's debut novel, Damned Pretty Things, was released in 2020 by Aqueduct Press. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, Century, and the Bending the Landscape anthology series. She is a graduate of the University of Washington and of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. She has twice been awarded literary funding from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, and in 1998 she received a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Seattle with her husband Brad and two house rabbits.