City of Weird Contributor: Kevin Meyer

Kevin Meyer's was the last submission to come through Forest Avenue Press' Submittable page for the City of Weird anthology at something like a minute before midnight. Maybe he thought that would be a fitting time to submit for a collection of fantasy and horror tales, or perhaps he's like me and always wants the freedom to keep tinkering up until the last moment. I knew as soon as I checked it out that I was going to take the story. It was everything I was looking for. It took a trope from the genre of "weird fiction" and turned it on its ear, making a story about one thing into a story about something else. It was equal parts creepy and hilarious. It was super fun and it was suuuuper weird. And as a bonus, he'd taken an existing piece of Portland lore and essentially written a sequel. Which is like using a Portland landmark but even better.

That urban legend is Polybius, a video game that was supposed to have surfaced in 1981, wreaked havoc on game players, and then disappeared without a trace a month later.

Those who say Polybius was only an urban legend need only look here for proof of its existence.

Kevin Meyer has been a co-facilitator for the Dangerous Writing fiction workshop and his work has been featured or is forthcoming in The Frozen Moment: Contemporary Writers on the Choices that Change Our Lives, Share PDX, Nailed Magazine, Noisehole Magazine, Gobshite Quarterly, and The Untold Gaze.

He's also an accomplished musician who performs under the name of Astro Warrior. I've watched him work, and it's fascinating and mesmerizing. I think what he does is called "noise music," and it's done by plugging cords and flipping switches and turning dials on synths that look like they come right out of the 1950s-era futuristic stories that partly inspired City of Weird. But it's not all space-age smoke and mirrors - it's skillfully created, kick-ass music. I shouldn't be allowed to use phrases like that, but there it is. You should totally keep an ear out for Astro Warrior gigs.

You can check his music out here.

Here's an upcoming show: November 3rd at Atlantis Lounge in Portland. More info is here!

It's also his birthday today.

The story "Out of Order" has one of my favorite last lines in City of Weird. But I'm going to give you a taste from the opening section. To hear more, come on down to Broadway Books this coming Tuesday (October 25) for our second City of Weird reading. There will be Voodoo doughnuts and we're hoping folks come in costume. The facebook event is here.

But now, in lieu of asking the entire internet to sing him Happy Birthday, here is a little taste of Kevin's writing.

I keep going back to that arcade-bar in Old Town, Ground Kontrol, to play Polybius. I’d never heard of Polybius until I saw the worn, eighties retro cabinet in the back corner of the lower floor of Ground Kontrol, lit up in the dark. 

Polybius isn’t even that fun, but it doesn’t matter. I can’t stop myself. I keep going back to play, even though I’m pretty sure Polybius is what started this whole thing. 

The thing is, I can’t remember. 

Every time I black out, I wake up and the dog’s licking my nosebleed. She’s a little dog, a Sheltie, couldn’t weigh more than twenty pounds, but she feels like a ten-ton hangover on my chest. Her sloppy, wet tongue and dog-breath stink on my face. 

I’m dead certain I’m going to wake up the way that French woman did a few years back. The one who got the world’s first face transplant after she passed out on painkillers and woke up with half her face missing. It wasn’t like her face vanished while she was passed out. Her goddamned dog chewed her face off.

City of Weird contributor: Leslie What

I'd never met Leslie What before the City of Weird book launch at Powell's on October 12th. Last year, when publisher Laura Stanfill took the blind down from our submissions page, and I could finally see the names and profiles of the writers whose pieces I'd chosen for the book, I was excited to look her up and find out that not only had Leslie won the Nebula Award for her short story "The Cost of Doing Business," which was published in Amazing Stories (one of those fabulous weird fiction magazines that so inspired this anthology), but her collection Crazy Love was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award.

I found her name very intriguing - Leslie What! And her sense of style as well! Here's a pic of her with the fab octopus jewelry she designed for the occasion.

That's Leslie on the right and publisher Laura Stanfill on the left sporting her own octopus jewelry on the evening after the Powell's launch event. And below, though without the fabulous glasses, is a better pic of Leslie's cephalopod ensemble.

It's made out of legos!

It was fun to discover that Leslie and I shared a college, California State University at Fullerton. She also earned a certificate in Vocational Nursing from Santa Ana College and an MFA in Writing from Pacific University, whereas I just quit college and joined the circus.

Leslie writes fantasy and literary fiction and nonfiction, and has published a staggering 80-plus short stories and essays in loads of places including Parabola, Bending the Landscape, Interfictions, Utne Reader, Los Angeles Review, Asimov’s, Lilith, Calyx, Fugue, Unstuck Journal, hold on, I have to breathe, Best New Horror, MacGuffin, and other anthologies and magazines. Along with Crazy Love, she also wrote the short story collection The Sweet and Sour Tongue and the novel Olympic Games: Zeus, Hera, and the Archetypal Battle of theSexes.

Here's a wonderful story, recently reprinted in See the Elephant Magazine.

I loved her City of Weird piece, "Trainwreck," from the very first line:

Last night, my housemate Peachy and I smoked so much weed he forgot we live in a houseboat.

How Portland is that?

Leslie's story does that wonderful thing where you laugh, but you're kind of uncomfortable about it, but you laugh, but you're kind of uncomfortable about it. Bert, her irresponsible stoner caregiver narrator, has misplaced his housemate/client Peachy after a night of getting baked and kind of forgetting he has someone to look after. "Trainwreck" is breezy and funny but it runs so much deeper, exploring shallowness, neglect, and the lies we tell ourselves in order to believe we're doing the right thing when we're just doing what we want.

Here's a favorite passage from the story, in which Bert sits down and makes a list of the things he needs to do in the wake of Peachy's disappearance. Note that Bert has not yet called the police but he has taken a trip to the local medical marijuana dispensary for "supplies."

I counted out the last of Peachy’s Vicodins (there were fifteen left), took a few tokes of Blueberry Kush, and popped a beer. I’d need to find another roommate to help with finances before May or it would be tight. I turned on my computer and waited another geologic era for it to boot up. I wanted to go on Craigslist and search for a new housemate. While I waited for the happy face screen to pop up, it occurred to me it might look suspicious if I advertised before filing a missing person report. Good thing I thought of that in time. I shut it all down and made myself a cup of instant coffee and sat at the kitchen table to force my brain to focus and come up with a workable plan: 

1) Call bank and triple-check on available funds. 

2) Look through Peachy’s things for an address for his parents. Write them a nice note about what a great guy their son was. 

3) Call Marine Patrol and police to file reports. 

4) Craigslist. 

5) Ask about refilling Peachy’s prescriptions. 

6) Clean up blood so nobody can CSI me with the date. 

7) Reorder this list and remember to call Marine Patrol and file missing person report before writing note to Peachy’s folks telling them he’s gone. 

8) Destroy this list and tidy up pot and Vicodin before cops arrive. 

9) Spray houseboat with deodorant spray. 

10) Get deodorant spray from Fred Meyer. 

And then, because I was hungry and because I thought lists should not have even numbers, I added, 

11) Eat lunch. 

I fixed a PB&J on Dave’s Killer Bread but it tasted all wrong and I only managed a few bites before choking up. “Peachy,” I said. “Old buddy.”

Hee! After all that, he eats the sandwich first! Do you see why I love this woman?! She will be reading at our event at Broadway Books this coming Tuesday. If you're interested, the facebook event page is here,

just before the explosion

This is so not the most important point to make about the explosion that happened in Portland yesterday, but it reminds me of how easy it is to forget to notice the beauty (even just visually) in our everyday lives. Every winter, I look back on fall and think to myself, did I look at the autumn trees enough? This year, because something wondrous is happening in my life with City of Weird, I keep consciously staring around me at the colors and the flutter of falling leaves. Trying to memorize the feeling of looking at the beauty of this particular fall.

On my way to work, I always drive down Glisan, past 23rd, to 24th, to jog over to my favorite street, 25th, in Northwest Portland, with the little roundabouts and lovely trees, but I also love to drive down 23rd, especially in winter when it's all lit up with twinkle lights. Winter is when my drive route usually changes from 25th to 23rd, but yesterday, when I got to the corner of Glisan and 23rd about twenty minutes before the gas leak was discovered that led to the amazingly efficient evacuation of the block before the explosion happened, I turned and looked down 23rd at the stretch of beautiful old buildings under orange leaves and blue sky. 

For a split second, I thought, drive down 23rd today. For a split second, because I didn't have my blinker on, I thought, eh, I'll do it tomorrow, no Friday, because I don't work tomorrow, yeah, I'll do it Friday. For a split second, I thought, but the sky is blue today. 

So I drove down 23rd and consciously noticed the beauty all the way down. Odd that some of that beauty is suddenly gone and the street will be blocked off, maybe for as long as the fall leaves are in the trees. And then again, next year when the leaves are back, yes, the street will be healed and pretty again.

Remnants Surprise

One of the things I love about designing book covers is getting to be a mostly anonymous part of the life of that book. Sometimes I'll go to a book launch or a reading and the author will get up at the podium and open the book and start reading, and I'll think to myself, that image on the front of that book: no one here knows I made that.

I love this.

At the same time, it's always a thrill and an honor when my work is thanked at those book launches, and sometimes an author will surprise me with a hug or flowers. At the recent Powell's opening for Robert Hill's The Remnants, I was surprised with a gift.

I kept the bag at my seat as Robert read and took questions but when people started lining up to get their books signed, I couldn't help but open it up and start rifling around in there.

The first thing I pulled out was a single package of saltines. Me being me, I started pulling out other stuff wrapped in tissue paper, thinking to myself, OK, where's the cheese. But then I got it. And it was such a perfect gift that I just had to share.

Two lovely tea cups, two saucers, a handful of teas and a package of saltines. It's an homage to the annual tea shared by the two main characters in the book. As Robert writes, "On every tenth of September since the molten lava cooled, True Bliss served tea and saltines to Kennesaw Belvedere in the parlor of her home on the occasion of his birth."

I love that. Thank you, Robert.

a moment in the day: the big moment

There's applause in the event space at Powell's City of Books. Laura Stanfill, the publisher of the anthology I edited, has just announced my name, and I'm hugging her probably longer than I should, and now I'm stepping up to the podium and looking out over a completely packed house full of friends and family and contributors and writers and people I don't know who are just interested in this book I helped make. This is one of those moments. One of the absolute biggest moments of my life.

I lean into the mic for my first words.

"I just had to give my husband my half-sucked cough drop."

City of Weird Contributor: Dan DeWeese

I've been writing up short pieces on each of the wonderful writers who contributed stories to City of Weird. Because of the book launch event coming up today at Powell's City of Books, I am starting with those authors who will be reading tonight. The final of those four is Dan DeWeese.

*

Some of the writers in City of Weird were known to me before I chose the stories for the book, some were not. Many actually were, because this is a collection about Portland, and you can't be a writer in Portland and not know lots of its writing community. With Dan DeWeese, the "small world" aspect of this project gets even more particular. Once, a long time ago, he was my teacher.

When I first moved to Portland more than ten years ago, I took a super fiction writing course at Portland State University, and Dan was the instructor. We studied Ursula Le Guin's fantastic writing book Steering the Craft, as well as some great short stories, including one of his own.

Years later, I got my first publication of a short story, in the anthology Portland Noir, and lo and behold, one of the stories was by Dan DeWeese. His piece, "The Sleeper," was one my favorites in the collection, less noir in the classic sense than many of the others, but imbued with such mood. Years later, still, (a couple, anyway) his novel You Don't Love This Man came out, and I fell in love with it. It's a fascinating character study of a very particular man on one very particular day of his life. It's his daughter's wedding day and she's gone missing, and it just so happens that the bank he manages just got robbed. The tension of the book ramps up and up as this day goes on, but the thing that really struck me and stuck with me was how beautifully drawn this very real, very complicated man is.

I love Dan's writing and am so excited to have a piece of it in City of Weird. And not only did he give me his carefully-honed voice, he gave me slime molds from outer space. "The Transformation" is, at its base, a commentary on man's impulse to conquer and his ability to talk himself into believing that what he wants to do is right, whether it really is or not. The story is funny and chilling, but I'm going to share a favorite passage that is more about beauty. Beauty of words and imagery and of imagination. To set you up, Pod is a life form that, like a spaceship, has traveled through the solar system, transporting slime molds to the Earth. She is made up of "innumerable chambers," all of which once housed the aforementioned slime molds - until she landed on Earth and let them out, to start in on their mission of taking over the planet. What happened next knocked my socks off.

The next day, Pod’s outer petals fell off. Uh-oh, she thought. That night, her inner petals fell, too, exposing many of her chambers. The chambers were empty now, of course, but it was still concerning. Then the architecture of the chambers themselves began to break down. Pod’s spongy walls dried and fell in, her limpid floors cracked and gave way. She lay amid her fallen petals, reduced to her barest self: a spine of interlaced fibers that had once been her core. She was afraid. 

Then, something amazing happened. A light breeze picked up, and one of Pod’s fibers detached and floated off on the breeze—and she was the fiber. And then another of the fibers floated away, and she was that fiber, too. Over the course of the next day, her core fibers disentangled, and each floated gently into the breeze. Pod was each fiber, simultaneously sensitive to innumerable locations and innumerable environments. Life was truly a wondrous mystery.

a moment in the day: cheers

The newspaper man and I sit at a two-top in the coffee shop, a to-go cup each. My coffee is called something like a Chile mocha, which I ordered because I'm meeting with a newspaper man and that makes me feel equal parts grown up and little-kid excited in a way that something as luxurious and ridiculous as a "Chile mocha" seems to call for.

I arrived ten minutes early. He'd told me to look for the "tall, balding old guy who will look like he's very out of place." When I walked in, the first thing I saw was two tall, balding guys sitting side by side in those kinds of coffee shop seats you sit in when you're by yourself or waiting for someone. One was working at an open laptop computer. One was on the phone. Neither appeared to be particularly out of place. I tried to pretend to look both in the eye for a quarter second and then I ran away to the counter to order my Chile mocha. Then I spent the next ten minutes wondering how long I'd wait before forcing myself to go back around the corner to confront the tall, balding guys, one of whom was surely my reporter but I didn't know which, and I was so happy when my actual reporter stepped around the corner and was a completely different tall, balding guy, and he had my book in one hand so I'd know for sure.

During the course of the interview, we've been talking about what what scares us in a good way - monsters and ghosts and vampires and science experiments gone wrong - versus what scares us in a bad way, a real way, and he brings up Donald Trump.

"I shouldn't say this" I say (I mean, he's got the recorder going and everything), "but he and I share a birthday."

"I'll go you one further," he says. "I share a birthday with Vladimir Putin."

In the next second and at exactly the same time we both raise our to-go cups and give a laughing, though understandably ill-at-ease, cheers.