Field Notes from the Ravine

Carmen Gilmore

Struggling to connect her young family to place, Carmen Gilmore starts researching the history of a local ravine, soon realizing that when you go looking for others’ stories, you can’t help but find your own. What is the story of a place? Intrigued by the absence of documented history about a local ravine, Carmen Gilmore sought to uncover more about its reclusive namesake, Mr. Petursson, and began piecing together his kaleidoscopic history. What started off as a curious interest about a quiet ravine became a profound personal exploration into how storytelling is connected to the land. Carmen and her children explored the ravine, foraging salvage materials that she then transformed into inks for a series of maps ― tiny topographies that she created to connect the stories she was reconstructing, such as the one about the chemical dump that contaminated the ravine’s waters yet preserved the wild space. In the course of her work, she found evidence of pre-colonial Métis river lots, deepening her personal journey toward Indigenous Reconciliation and her understanding of the land she now calls home. Written as a series of braided essays, Carmen weaves together Mr. Petursson’s history and her own unfurling connection to place, uncovering her family’s long connection to Indigenous sovereignty and developing a nuanced understanding of how we all belong.

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The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

Elisabeth Tova Bailey

In a work that beautifully demonstrates the rewards of closely observing nature, Elisabeth Bailey shares an inspiring and intimate story of her uncommon encounter with a Neohelix albolabris —a common woodland snail. While an illness keeps her bedridden, Bailey watches a wild snail that has taken up residence on her nightstand. As a result, she discovers the solace and sense of wonder that this mysterious creature brings and comes to a greater understanding of her own confined place in the world. Intrigued by the snail’s molluscan anatomy, cryptic defenses, clear decision making, hydraulic locomotion, and mysterious courtship activities, Bailey becomes an astute and amused observer, providing a candid and engaging look into the curious life of this underappreciated small animal.  Told with wit and grace, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating is a remarkable journey of survival and resilience, showing us how a small part of the natural world illuminates our own human existence and provides an appreciation of what it means to be fully alive.

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Rottenheart

Kat Dunn

Revenge me. For I am murdered . . . Odette and her best friend, Cecilia, grow up between two grand homes, one in Hampstead and one in Suffolk, the ancient and imposing Herne House. Odette’s mother, Lydia, is almost parasitic in her neediness, but despite her, Odette and Cecilia come of age together—free to roam, to learn, and to love. When Lydia inexplicably sickens and dies, a dark veil falls. Odette’s father retreats to his study, while her aunt—the cold and cruel Claudine—increasingly takes charge of the household. Lost in grief and spiraling into madness, Odette disappears into the shadows, leaving Cecilia alone and with her affections tested. As Claudine is announced as Odette’s new stepmother, the girls reckon with this final betrayal, and a sinister presence awakens. To her horror, Odette realizes that her mother never truly left. She now haunts the manor, ready to drag long- held secrets into the light and exact revenge against those who thought her dead and gone. A visceral tale of grief and madness, Rottenheart exhumes the heart of Hamlet to tell a fearless queer love story laced with an unforgettable haunting, asking whether we can truly outrun our suffering, or if we are forever indebted to the vengeful dead.

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Field Notes from the Ravine

Carmen Gilmore

Struggling to connect her young family to place, Carmen Gilmore starts researching the history of a local ravine, soon realizing that when you go looking for others’ stories, you can’t help but find your own. What is the story of a place? Intrigued by the absence of documented history about a local ravine, Carmen Gilmore sought to uncover more about its reclusive namesake, Mr. Petursson, and began piecing together his kaleidoscopic history. What started off as a curious interest about a quiet ravine became a profound personal exploration into how storytelling is connected to the land. Carmen and her children explored the ravine, foraging salvage materials that she then transformed into inks for a series of maps ― tiny topographies that she created to connect the stories she was reconstructing, such as the one about the chemical dump that contaminated the ravine’s waters yet preserved the wild space. In the course of her work, she found evidence of pre-colonial Métis river lots, deepening her personal journey toward Indigenous Reconciliation and her understanding of the land she now calls home. Written as a series of braided essays, Carmen weaves together Mr. Petursson’s history and her own unfurling connection to place, uncovering her family’s long connection to Indigenous sovereignty and developing a nuanced understanding of how we all belong.

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Cracks

Kristy Park Kulski

Horror and myth collide when a Korean American teenager's grief summons something ancient: a water ghost that has been feeding on her family's sorrow for decades. Dark strands of hair crack the corners of my sight, suspended as always in the air, spidering and floating as if in liquid. Mul-gwishin. Water ghost. Gracie Russell feels she belongs nowhere. In suburban 1990s Washington, she is constantly at sea—struggling with her biracial identity, her father's violent alcoholism, and her mother's looming mortality. When Ji-eun dies, Gracie will lose her last chance to mend their relationship. But she can already feel her mother slipping away, pulled by the tides of memory back to authoritarian 1970s South Korea. The secret she buried there has awakened something in the deep. And now it is rising. As Ji-eun's body weakens and the autumn rains fall in torrents, the sound of dripping water haunts Gracie. Cracks form in the basement wall, exposing a crumbling passageway to a sea of liquid darkness, and Gracie is running out of time. The mul-gwishin is coming for her. For readers of Catriona Ward and Han Kang, Cracks is a harrowing vision of heritage, violence, and the histories that possess.

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Cracks

Kristy Park Kulski

Horror and myth collide when a Korean American teenager's grief summons something ancient: a water ghost that has been feeding on her family's sorrow for decades. Dark strands of hair crack the corners of my sight, suspended as always in the air, spidering and floating as if in liquid. Mul-gwishin. Water ghost. Gracie Russell feels she belongs nowhere. In suburban 1990s Washington, she is constantly at sea—struggling with her biracial identity, her father's violent alcoholism, and her mother's looming mortality. When Ji-eun dies, Gracie will lose her last chance to mend their relationship. But she can already feel her mother slipping away, pulled by the tides of memory back to authoritarian 1970s South Korea. The secret she buried there has awakened something in the deep. And now it is rising. As Ji-eun's body weakens and the autumn rains fall in torrents, the sound of dripping water haunts Gracie. Cracks form in the basement wall, exposing a crumbling passageway to a sea of liquid darkness, and Gracie is running out of time. The mul-gwishin is coming for her. For readers of Catriona Ward and Han Kang, Cracks is a harrowing vision of heritage, violence, and the histories that possess.

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Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film

Carol J. Clover

Do the pleasures of horror movies really begin and end in sadism? So the public discussion of film assumes, and so film theory claims. Carol Clover argues, however, that these films work mainly to engage the viewer in the plight of the victim-hero - the figure, often a female, who suffers pain and fright but eventually rises to vanquish the forces of oppression.

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Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film

Carol J. Clover

Do the pleasures of horror movies really begin and end in sadism? So the public discussion of film assumes, and so film theory claims. Carol Clover argues, however, that these films work mainly to engage the viewer in the plight of the victim-hero - the figure, often a female, who suffers pain and fright but eventually rises to vanquish the forces of oppression.

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