About the Editors
Editor-in-Chief
Sari Krosinsky lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with her partner and two cats.
She received a B.A. in religious studies and a M.A. in creative writing from the University of New Mexico. Her poems have appeared in Pebble Lake Review, The American Poetry Journal, Arsenic Lobster, The Same and Verse Daily.
Fiction Editor
Leslie Fox lived in Central America during her formative years and in New Mexico since the mid-70s – before it was cool.
She writes novels, short stories, plays, screenplays and creative nonfiction. Some of her short fiction has appeared in The Medical Muse, red. a journal of arts, Earth’s Daughters and Earthships: A New Mecca Poetry Collection. She has a M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of New Mexico.
Fickle Muses Blog
May 20, 2007
Transformation is a central element in much myth and folktale: the prince transformed into a frog and back again, the old crone into a beautiful young girl, mice into horses, men into swine. One look at a Gorgon and you were turned to stone. C.S. Lewis’s Snow Queen had a similar ability. Transformation fiction appears in movies like “The Shaggy D. A.,” “Big,” “Freaky Friday” and “Shrek,” to mention a few.
In the Inuit tale, Sedna’s fingers, severed as punishment for refusing to marry, fall into the ocean and turn into whales. In Chinese fox-myths, a fox-spirit can shift into human form, either male or female, but most often in the guise of a seductive woman. These fox-spirits sound a bit like incubi and succubae. I can’t help but wonder why transformation myth emerges in all cultures. Magical thinking seems to be embedded in our global consciousness. Is it an attempt by humans to make sense of the world? Undoubtedly, some transmogrifications can be read as metaphors for sexual awakening, others as fear of the unknown. Does the obsession to read transformational fiction (or write it) come out of a feeling of powerlessness over one’s life, the world around one? Is it just escapist fantasy? Today, Vampire tales line bookstore shelves – a testimony to our belief in the idea that transformation is empowering, or at least, fascinating.
What is most interesting in modern fiction where people have morphed into something or someone other than themselves is their psychological reaction to the world from inside their new shell (Kafka’s cockroach, Rice’s Vampire Lestat). I’d love to know how Daphne felt after being turned into a laurel tree – was she pissed? Not only a virgin forever, but trapped in bark unable to move. I know she wanted to be rescued from Neptune b
ut wasn’t that a little extreme? And what were Circe’s victims thinking after being changed into swine? Perhaps they only thought about what slop would appear in the trough for dinner. I love the painting by John William Waterhouse where Circe serenely sips her wine with the newly transformed enemies. It seems transformation can be empowering to those with the ability to either metamorphose or change others (is that why we like witches and superheroes?), yet being transformed against your will could be horrifying – unless you were changed into a princess or some other “improved” station, but even that could be disquieting – and make for good fiction.
– Leslie
May 19, 2007
Reprinted from the El Paso Times
Poet explores power of words in coping with disaster
By Rigoberto González
Juan J. Morales is an American poet with an unusual ethnic ancestry (his mother is Ecuadoran; his father, Puerto Rican), and his work is cultivated 
out of a desire to record and remember the ways in which oral history, lore, superstition and mythology trickle down and intertwine through generations as a means of cultural survival.
This noble mission is driven to fruition with the release of "Friday and the Year That Followed" (Fairweather Books, $13.95 paperback), winner of the Rhea and Seymour Gorsline Poetry Competition. It's a debut that takes Latino poetry back to the homeland, where the collision of the Old World and the New continue to stimulate the imagination.
The opening section, "Ambato," and the book's title refer to the 1949 earthquake that terrified people living at the base of the Andes. Poems read like testimonies and hearsay, neither to be doubted despite the incredible claims of prophecy ("Mamá dreamed the earthquake / the night before it happened") and tragedy (like the man earth swallowed up to the neck, "the head stranded / in the constant rows of corn").
The year that followed that fateful August Friday is a year of reckoning, of healing through stories of luck and miracles in order to recover faith after loss. For the rest of the world, the natural disaster is but a six-line newspaper story "somewhere in the back pages." The responsibility of memory falls on the townfolk and on their progeny.
That same sensibility is expressed in the second section, which dramatizes the life of a Puerto Rican soldier wounded in the Korean War and his struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder. The discharged soldier's peripatetic existence is fraught with painful flashbacks because he empathizes with both sides of the international conflict, from the sleepwalking American soldier who sleeps bound with a rope, to the prisoners at the Koje Do Reeducation Camp who "shiver like shreds of laundry hanging on sharpened wire."
These poems affirm that the casualties of war are not only soldiers, but also the soldiers' familial and romantic relationships. And as the poet commits the experience to language, so too does he lift, if only in gesture, the Puerto Rican soldier's burdens.
The final section of the book, aptly titled "Wandering between Villages," centers on the tall tales of the Southwest, the poet's new geography and legacy. The picaresque figure Patapalo and the Aztec god Mictlantecuhtli have now been bridged to Viracocha, the Incan god of creation, and to the pre-Columbian Nazca lines of South America that "sleep like bones and potshards / under the stars and sun."
Morales' project, which streams across eras, continents and peoples, is actually about a Friday and the centuries that precede and follow. This ambitious book of poems taps into the psyche of legend and the necessity of storytelling, and succeeds in commemorating family history.
As a first book, "Friday and the Year That Followed" holds much promise for future accomplishment.
Rigoberto González is an award-winning writer living in New York City. His Web site is www.rigobertogonzalez.com, and he may be reached at Rigoberto70@aol.com.
May 6, 2007
Those who have been following FM may recall a blurb in the news section calling for editors to join a planning group to form an organization serving online literary publications. The first phase is now up and running at http://www.onlineliteraryassociation.com.
Current content includes a survey of online literary journals to get a broad picture of who we are, where we come from, and where we want to go; and a forum for publishers to trade advice and experience. Other projects are underway. For the present, membership is free.
If you publish or are considering starting an online journal or e-book press for poetry, fiction and/or creative nonfiction, I hope you'll stop by.
– Sari
April 2007 entries
March 2007 entries
February 2007 entries
January 2007 entries