"Franklinstein" by Sue Landers

The March, 2017 Poetry Is Not a Luxury Book Club selection is Franklinstein by Susan Landers

A place of good blocks and bad blocks and brick roads
and boxwoods. The site
of America’s first gingko tree.
The birthplace of pushpins and Louisa May Alcott.
A place of sparrows and spires and schist

Franklinstein is both poetry and literary nonfiction. Its hybrid poetry/prose genre tells the story of one Philadelphia neighborhood, Germantown—a historic, beloved place, wrestling with legacies of colonialism, racism, and capitalism. Drawing from interviews, historical research, and two divergent but quintessential American texts (The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans), Landers' Franklinstein is a monster readers have not encountered before.

"FRANKLINSTEIN is a church of stained glass truth- telling."—Yolanda Wisher

"In her study of Germantown, Landers derives a poetics of urban history, of being from, really from, a place—Philadelphia—that cuts itself into your skin."—Simone White

 

Susan Landers on how this collection came to be

At the beginning of this writing I was reading. Reading two books I had never read before: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and The Making of Americans. And as I was reading, I thought: I should make a new book. A new book from pieces. A new book using only Ben’s words and Gertrude’s. And so I did that. For months. Cutting and pasting little pieces. To make a monster. And it was so boring.

It was so boring, my dead thing of parts.

Then the church I grew up in closed. The church where my mother and father were married. The church where they baptized their babies. A church in Philadelphia in the neighborhood where I grew up. A kind of rundown place. A place of row homes and vacants and schist.

And when I went there to see that place—the place that was with me from my very beginning—I thought, this will breathe life into my pieces. This will be the soul of my parents. I thought: if I could write the story of this place and its beginnings, this writing would be the right thing, a kind of living.

This is where my writing began. 

from An interview with Susan Landers in Tinge magazine:  My project started when I could no longer stand the fact that I hadn’t yet read Making of Americans (as a Stein fan) or The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (as a Philadelphian). So, I decided to spend 40 days of my 40^th year reading them both and writing down lines that stood out to me — either musically or semantically.

from A review in FemLit Magazine:  In Franklinstein, Susan Landers tells the story of Germantown, a Philadelphia neighborhood. The mixed-genre volume starts as an elegy for a closing church in Germantown. It is at once an ode to this place and a critical scouring of how the history of such places are made.

PhillyVoice explores Germantown with Susan Landers:  It was right around this time, this church [St. Francis of Assisi] I had grown up in, in Germantown, was closing. And I remember appreciating it as a child and said ‘I want to see it before it becomes’ — what I said at the time —  ‘another abandoned building in a neighborhood of abandoned buildings.’ So I wanted to see it before it became this lost space. And when I went down to see it, I realized that interpretation of Germantown was totally wrong. It’s not a place of abandoned buildings, even though there are some, and I realized that Germantown, this place, was really complex. It wears all of its history on its sleeve. You hear the language of the Lenape in the Wissahickon and the street names are all [named after] these Revolutionary War generals. And there’s like an — it’ll be an 18th-century mansion next to a steak and cheese [shop] next to a factory from the industrial revolution. It’s just all [these sights] combined. All these layers. 

 

the

we

of incense and boxwood and brick

pride and bullets and prayer

wisteria and helicopters and figs

turtles and burkas and hacks.

Staff Review - Kaleidoscope: Diverse YA Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories, edited by Alisa Krasnostein and Julia Rios

"What do a disabled superhero, a time-traveling Chinese-American figure skater, and a transgender animal shifter have in common? They're all stars of Kaleidoscope stories!

"Kaleidoscope collects fun, edgy, meditative, and hopeful YA science fiction and fantasy with diverse leads. These twenty original stories tell of scary futures, magical adventures, and the joys and heartbreaks of teenage life."

When the editors entitled this collection Kaleidoscope: Diverse YA Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories, they were not kidding around. The book is full of difference -- in race, culture, gender, sexuality, ability, mobility, physical and mental health, religion, and economic status (not to mention species and style of magic) -- and one of the most notable things is that it's not the purview of the protagonist alone but woven into the fabric of each story. The diversity is so thick on the ground here that it's like walking through an Alison Bechdel comic strip -- or like walking through Mt. Airy. I confess to a fond partiality for "Signature," by Faith Mudge, set in a small indie bookshop in Queensland, Australia. The story starts out so full of cozy and familiar detail that I had to remind myself partway through that there would be fantasy coming!

There is also geographic diversity, though that's partly because the book is a multinational effort, with even the editors working together from opposite hemispheres. There are two Philly-area authors in the mix, whom we're hoping to bring to the store in the fall. "Krishna Blue" by Shveta Thakrar is filled with colors so vivid you can taste them, while Eugene Myers' "Kiss and Kiss and Kiss and Tell" delves into possible futures, drug interactions, and kissing games. Shveta and Eugene have both visited before, and we're looking forward to seeing them here again!

Some other favorites of mine:

"Cookie Cutter Superhero" by Tansy Rayner Roberts - Joey must leave school to become a superhero, and everything in her life will change. Well...maybe not quite everything.

"Vanilla" by Dirk Flinthart - A fascinating and sweet look at immigration and assimilation, and the meaning of friendship.

"Careful Magic" - Imagine being the only declared (and highly skilled) Order worker in a high school full of Chaos. Yeah, it's like that.

I read the stories in order, and I found the writing consistently engaging and compelling. As I scroll through the list of titles I keep seeing more and more stories I really enjoyed. So many different kinds of stories, so many different kinds of difference! Rather than try to describe them all, I will offer a list of odd pairings I noticed as I read through. I was entertained to discover that the highly disparate collection nonetheless contains...
2 lotteries
2 love spells
2 vampires
2 cosmic bridges
2 unpredictable machines
2 sets of daily protection rituals
2 interactions with alien species
2 strange types of four-legged animals
and 2 characters with veterinary interests.

Good luck with your own explorations! Kaleidoscope offers a wild ride to places both enticingly new and comfortingly familiar, and it's a great addition to the worlds of both YA and SFF.

-- Reviewed by Jennifer Sheffield
(Review originally posted in the August Big Blue YA Newsletter.)

A thicker picture book than usual...

Yesterday's American Library Association award announcements at the Philadelphia Convention Center included a bit of a surprise for the Caldecott: The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which is over 500 pages long! It's an excellent book. We're also excited to see that Elijah of Buxton, which is one of my Staff Picks, won a Coretta Scott King Award (having also recently won the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction)!

Further edification: On our Mt Airy and Beyond links page, we have links to the official web pages of a long list of book awards (including ALA), so you can always check there for current recommendations of outstanding books.

What if the good guys won?

Grist has a review of Kim Stanley Robinson's Capitol Code trilogy: Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, and Sixty Days and Counting. Dealing with a near-future earth that is fighting global warming, these books present some compelling possibilities. (I was reading the first one just as hurricane Katrina hit!)
Check out the review at
http://www.grist.org/advice/books/2007/04/05/higgins-freese/index.html?source=weekly

2006 Tiptree Award Winners are here!

Here at Big Blue Marble we like feminist science fiction, so we're very excited that the 2006 Tiptree Award Winners are here: Half Life by Shelley Jackson, and The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden by Catherynne M. Valente. This year's jury also gave special recognition to Julie Philips' biography James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon.

We also have these books from the Tiptree Honor List:
The Privilege of the Sword, by Ellen Kushner (2006)
St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, by Karen Russell (2006)
A Brother's Price, by Wen Spencer (2005)

Check out http://www.tiptree.org/ for more Tiptree Winners and more information about the Tiptree Award. You can also find more information about this year's winners at http://www.wiscon.info/downloads/W31eCube9.html.

The Tiptree Awards will be presented on May 27, 2007 at WisCon; Jen and I will be there!

Nif

Nif's Recent Reads

I read really fast, so I thought it would be fun to keep a log of the books I read each week.

NIF’S RECENT READS

Young Adult

Getting It by Alex Sanchez, published by Simon and Schuster, $16.95 hardcover

Carlos is 15 and has never had a girlfriend or a hookup or anything. When he notices that Sal, who is gay, is comfortable talking with girls, he decides to ask Sal for some “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” type help. Sal agrees, but only if Carlos will help him start a gay-straight alliance at their school.

*

I just discovered Adrian Fogelin, who writes moving, humorous stories about interracial friendship and young teens learning to be true to themselves. I read these two and am eager to read more.

Crossing Jordan, by Adrian Fogelin, published by Peachtree Press, $6.95 paperback
Cass’s dad builds a fence when he finds out that the new neighbors are black. But Cass and Jemmie both love to run, and they forge a friendship stronger than their parents’ disapproval.

The Big Nothing, by Adrian Fogelin, published by Peachtree Press, $6.95 paperback
Justin’s dad left home, his mom is depressed, and his brother is about to be shipped to Iraq. Learning to play the piano brings much needed solace, but also awakens a crush on a girl more popular than him.

Young Adult Fantasy and Science Fiction

Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett, published by Avon Tempest, $16.99 hardcover

I may have mentioned that I intend to read everything Terry Pratchett writes. This third book about Tiffany Aching is pure fun. If you’ve read Wee Free Men and A Hat Full of Sky, Wintersmith is a must-read. If you haven’t read any of them, what are you waiting for?

*

At WisCon this year I was pleased to meet Scott Westerfield and his wife Justine Larbalestier. Both are writing fresh, exciting young adult SF&F from down under, and I was really excited to see these sequels come out.

Specials by Scott Westerfield, published by Simon Pulse, $15.95 hardcover

This is the conclusion of the trilogy that started with Uglies and Pretties. In Tally’s world, everyone gets cosmetic surgery when they turn 16…whether they want it or not. Tally and her friends are now Special, their rebellious natures subverted to make them part of the controlling elite of their society.

Magic Lessons by Justine Larbalestier, published by Razorbill, $16.99 hardcover

Only a few short weeks ago, fifteen-year-old Reason thought that magic didn’t exist. Now she knows that has to use magic, or else she’ll go crazy, but if she uses too much magic, she will die. Family and friends with similar powers are faced with the same hard choices. Reason is caught between two powerful grandparents with suspicious motives, pulled between Sydney and New York, and chased by a mysterious figure with magical powers unlike that of anyone else she knows. Who will help her? Who can she trust? The second book of the trilogy that began with Magic or Madness.

More to come...