Shining Moon Episode 23: Mythology, Folklore, and Prehistoric Fiction

Hello, and welcome to Shining Moon Episode 23. Today we’ll be talking about mythology, folklore, and prehistoric fiction. My guests today are Robin Duncan, Jelena Dunato, Sam W. Pisciotta.  Let’s start with some introductions.

 R. K. Duncan is a fat queer polyamorous wizard and author of fantasy, horror, and occasional sci-fi. He writes from a few rooms of a venerable West Philadelphia row home, where he dreams of travel and the demise of capitalism. His other full-time job is keeping house for himself and his live-in partner. Before settling on writing, he studied linguistics and philosophy at Haverford college. He attended Viable Paradise 23 in 2019. His occasional musings and links to other work can be found at rkduncan-author.com

 Jelena Dunato  is an art historian, curator, speculative fiction writer and lover of all things ancient. She grew up in Croatia on a steady diet of adventure novels and then wandered the world for a decade, building a career in the arts. 

 Jelena’s stories have been published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Dark, Future SF and Mermaids Monthly, among others. Her debut novel, "Dark Woods, Deep Water” is available from Ghost Orchid Press. She is a member of SFWA and Codex.

Jelena lives on an island in the Adriatic with her husband, daughter and cat.

Twitter - @jelenawrites
Bluesky - @jelenawrites.bsky.social
Insta - jelena_author 

 Sam W. Pisciotta holds an M.A. in Literary Studies from the University of Colorado. He is a recent graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop. He is a member of SFWA, HWA, and Codex Writers. His fiction has appeared in Analog, Asimov’s, F&SF, PodCastle, and other fine publications. His award-winning artwork has been shown throughout Colorado. Follow him at www.silo34.com.

Stories featured in this episode:


R.K. Duncan

"Clever Jack, Heavy with Stories," Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Issue #304, May 21, 2020 https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/clever-jack-heavy-with-stories/

"Eat the World,"  Lackington’s, Issue 25, 2022. https://lackingtons.com/2022/08/03/eat-the-world-by-r-k-duncan/


Jelana Dunato

"Immortelle" The Dark. https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/immortelle/

“The Collector” Cossmass Infinities #6, December 12, 2021, https://www.cossmass.com/stories/the-collector/


Sam W. Pisciotta

“Song of Nyx” forthcoming in Analog, January 2024.

“The Island of Dolls” Ghostlore Anthology by Alternative Stories Podcast. April 1, 2022

"Don't tell me that the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." -- Anton Chekov

Piano music for closure

Thank you for listening to Shining Moon! You can reach the host, Deborah L. Davitt, at the following social media platforms:

www.facebook.com/deborah.davitt.3

Bluesky: @deborahldavitt.bsky.social

www.deborahldavitt.com

Transcript

Deborah L. Davitt (00:00.651)
Hello and welcome to Shining Moon episode 23. I'm your host, Deborah L. Davitt. Today we'll be talking about mythology, folklore, and prehistoric fiction. My guests today are R.K. Duncan, Jelena Dunato, and Sam W. Pisciota. Let's start with some introductions. 

R.K. Duncan, and I will say that I do not write these, my guests write these, is a fat, queer, polyamorous wizard and author of fantasy, horror, and occasional sci-fi.

He writes from a few rooms of a venerable West Philadelphia row home where he dreams of travel and the demise of capitalism. His other full-time job is keeping house for himself and his live-in partner. Before settling on writing, he studied linguistics and philosophy at Haverford College. That is a wonderful combination. We will have to talk about linguistics at some point because that's fun. He attended Viable Paradise 23 in 2019. His occasional musings and links to other work can be found at RK Duncan.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:03.066)
Hi, Robin. Welcome to the podcast I'm really pleased to have you on.

Robin (01:06.324)
Well, thanks for having me. It's lovely to be here.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:09.671)
All right, Jelena Dunato is an art historian, curator, speculative fiction writer, and lover of all things ancient. She grew up in Croatia on a steady diet of adventure novels and then wandered the world for a decade building a career in the arts. Jelena's stories have been published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Dark, Future Science Fiction, and Mermaids Monthly, among others. Her debut novel, Dark Woods, Deep Water, is available from Ghost Orchard Press. She is a member of SFWA and Codex.

Jelena lives on an island in the Adriatic with her husband, daughter, and cat. I will have full links to her socials in the notes beneath the podcast. Hi, Jelena. Welcome back. It's nice to have you.

Jelena (01:52.574)
Oh, hello, and thank you very much for having me again.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:57.651)
It's a pleasure to have you back. 

Sam W. Pisciotta holds an MA in Literary Studies from the University of Colorado. He is a recent graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop. He is a member of SFWA, HWA, and Codex Writers. His fiction has appeared in analog, Asimov's, FNSF, Podcastle, and other fine publications. His award-winning artwork has been shown throughout Colorado. I did not know that, that's pretty cool. follow him at www.silo34.com. Hi Sam, welcome to the podcast.

Sam W. Pisciotta (02:31.431)
It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Deborah L. Davitt (02:34.871)
Oh, this is gonna be a fun conversation that they sent me a bunch of questions that I did not come up with off the top of my head. So it's gonna be an in-depth conversation about mythology, prehistoric fiction and folklore. We've got a lot of really great stories to talk about today. So let's get started. The first question I have for all of you is why do you think it's important to keep dipping into these stories? Why is it important to keep a connection to the past? And that is,

a story, a topic that I love because I write alternate history, I write fantasy, I write folklore, I write all these things. So let's go ahead and start at the top with, with Robin. How do you, why, why is it important to start dipping, to keep dipping into these stories? Why is it important to keep them alive?

Robin (03:19.34)
I mean, for me, the first reason that I keep doing it is just because I think they're really neat. But also, I read a lot and I listen to a lot of folk music and kind of embed myself in specifically the folklore of the British Isles of Ireland and England and Scotland, which is where most of my heritage comes from, as sort of like... It's a...

Deborah L. Davitt (03:39.843)
Mm-hmm.

Robin (03:47.392)
It's a fast statement on the internet sometimes that white people do not have a culture. Um, and that's like, because American white supremacy is about homogenizing cultures, right? It is, is giving up of an amount of heritage in order to participate in that, like very sort of closed in box of white supremacist culture and like connecting to my heritage back in Europe and that kind of folklore is part of like, this is the culture that I have that is not just. You know,

Deborah L. Davitt (03:51.779)
Mm.

Deborah L. Davitt (03:57.012)
Yeah.

Robin (04:17.144)
constructed whiteness. This is something more that I can really belong to. And these, these are, yeah, and a reconstruction. This is sort of what's lost by the flattening that white supremacy necessitates. And that's part of like, so for me, it was trying to, trying to reconnect with something like that, um, is a big reason that's important to me.

Deborah L. Davitt (04:19.685)
Mm-hmm.

It's a rebellion of sorts.

Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (04:32.641)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (04:39.015)
Okay, that is interesting and we will get back to that. Elena, you obviously come at this from a very different perspective because your culture is not one that's dominant on the world stage. Why is it important to bring your culture up and let it thrive in the light as it were? Why do you wanna keep connecting back to it?

Jelena (05:05.391)
Well, because, you know, unlike what's happening with Robin and his culture, for us, you know, as Faulkner said, you know, past is not dead, it's not even past, it's here. So I live in a place which has been inhabited for thousands of years and which has, you know, a tradition that just keeps on building on other older traditions. And you know, there's a...

Deborah L. Davitt (05:18.434)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (05:26.369)
Yeah!

Deborah L. Davitt (05:34.123)
Oh, that's beautiful.

Jelena (05:34.795)
sense of continuity. And, you know, when you connect with that, you're basically connecting to yourself and you're trying to tell the stories of your own culture. And it's not, you know, there's this feeling when you come from a really small culture and you start publishing. At first, you feel that you have to be the representative of your own culture, that you're the person, you know, that has the voice to speak. But then you realize that

Deborah L. Davitt (05:54.197)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (05:58.583)
Mm-hmm.

Jelena (06:03.491)
The only person you can speak for is yourself. So basically I'm not trying, I am including my own culture and past, but I'm speaking for myself. I'm not speaking for the whole culture. I don't like to carry that burden.

Deborah L. Davitt (06:07.286)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (06:18.739)
Okay, I really like the, and I'm a little bit envious, okay, I'm a lot envious of the being able to connect to thousands of years of culture and basically connecting with yourself through the culture. So that's a beautiful sentiment and I just wanted to highlight that. Sam, why do you think it's important to keep dipping into these old, old stories? Why do we keep turning back to them as a touchstone?

Sam W. Pisciotta (06:45.098)
Well, yeah, I do think it's that connection that we have for them. And I think as artists, we're the flame keepers, right? I mean, the artists are the ones that keep passing these stories, from the past to the future, through retellings and allusions, and we find them in fiction, poetry, paintings and songs, and all of these references keep coming up and these stories.

getting retold and they're consumed by the tribe or the community. And it's really our role to do that. And I think, you know, by re-imagining them often, we can bring them into a contemporary space as well. But I do think that these stories teach us something about ourselves, not just as individuals, but also as members of larger communities. And...

Deborah L. Davitt (07:43.373)
Yeah.

Sam W. Pisciotta (07:43.606)
you mentioned touchstone, I think that's important, because you can listen to one of these stories and say, I recognize myself in that, I see the universal there. Or you can say, I don't think that that's true anymore. And so it allows us to reflect on something that maybe is no longer valuable as a community and then come up with new answers.

Deborah L. Davitt (07:51.651)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (08:04.167)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (08:07.735)
that's what relates to the subversion of mythology, which we will definitely hit on later. Let's see, you started to talk a little bit about this Sam, so I'm gonna stick with you for a moment. What can a contemporary audience take away from the themes touched on in myths and tales from our past? What specifics would you like to see carried forward in the flame keeping?

Sam W. Pisciotta (08:35.294)
Well, you know, I, when I think about mythology in particular, but it's true of all stories too. I'm a big fan of Joseph Campbell, so, and that whole monomyth, and the hero's quest and things like that, and the hero's journey. Those types of structures, I think, work well for me and my storytelling.

but I also, some of those universal themes, you know, what he tried to do as well and what other mythologists and folklorists have tried to do is try to find those commonalities and those universals that transcend culture. And I like that. I like that aspect of trying to find that thing that we all have in common and then touching on that and bringing it forward as well. So.

and through some of the themes, even traditional themes, like trickster, or I mean, there's ways to make those things contemporary, but I think, yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (09:39.327)
Oh yes.

I have seen some really interesting cyberpunk takes on trickster so that you can definitely see things taken forward and reimagined in really fascinating ways. Robin, do you use mythology as a touchdown that other people will recognize or do you use mythology that's less well known? And if you use lesser known myths, why do you?

Robin (10:06.31)
I think I mostly use more obscure things, especially in sort of the mythological or historic and prehistoric mode. Like, I'll reference fairly common folktales, but usually only in the background. I mean, part of that is just that I really, I get really into obscure things when I read them. And I do a lot of reading and a lot of listening to folk music. So I'll, I put these

Deborah L. Davitt (10:17.64)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (10:26.277)
Yes.

Robin (10:32.524)
weird things into the stories and like, it's fun to create an Easter egg for people who are going to see what you're doing and be, you know, sickos.jpg for it. And I also think I tend to obscure better known things when I put them in my work. Like I have a story that could be a Persephone and Hades retelling, but I'm not sure anyone would figure that out if I didn't tell them.

Deborah L. Davitt (10:38.291)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (10:44.063)
Hehehehe

Deborah L. Davitt (10:59.16)
Ha ha.

Alright, fair enough.

Deborah L. Davitt (11:07.619)
Elena, when you do use folklore and fairy tale retellings, and when you do use mythology and folklore as scaffolding, when do you use them as retellings and when do you use them as scaffolding on which you grow ideas of your own, or is there a distinction for you?

Jelena (11:27.551)
The thing is I don't do retellings very often because if I did... First of all, I mean, Croatian legends and fairy tales are not very well known. I mean, they're not known at all, let's be honest. So if I did a retelling, there's a chance that nobody would actually recognize it as such. So there's not much point in doing that because people would probably see it as a new story. And also...

Deborah L. Davitt (11:31.705)
Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (11:40.113)
Mm.

Deborah L. Davitt (11:55.67)
Mm-hmm.

Jelena (11:56.851)
I mean, it's just, it's not something that attracts me very much. I like to tell my own stories. But I do use elements of folklore. I will use mythological creatures, I will use gods, I will use some tropes which are present there. But I will not use a particular story and try to change it or retell it.

Deborah L. Davitt (12:15.082)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (12:25.471)
That is definitely very much describes one of the stories that you submitted for this particular podcast. And we will get to that in a little bit, because you definitely are using the gods, you're using their trappings, but you're making it very much your own. So I liked that. But fairy tale and folktale retellings are fairly common. If you do use them.

How do you make them your own, engage them with a fresh voice, or find a take that's completely new? And I'll throw that open for anybody who wants to answer that.

Sam W. Pisciotta (13:00.09)
Oh, well, I would say for me, I think I've tried to do this once where I've done a retelling and it was for Daphne and Apollo. And I noticed that it is because it's very problematic, isn't it? Like, because Daphne has no agency in the story. So, and it is still circulating to editors.

Deborah L. Davitt (13:00.483)
Go ahead Sam.

Deborah L. Davitt (13:15.819)
Oh, that's a hard one to redo in this modern age.

Deborah L. Davitt (13:21.448)
Yes, extremely.

Sam W. Pisciotta (13:28.342)
But I still really like the story. And so what I had to do is give Daphne agency. And it's hard. So you have to think about that. Like, well, what do you want her to do? Like, either she can just totally overcome Apollo and become badass and whatever and slam or whatever it's going to be. Or for me, the answer was something more subtle, where she still transforms.

but the transformation is through her own agency, it's through her own request. But I do think that.

Deborah L. Davitt (14:03.424)
Mm-hmm. So it's not just her calling out to a god and having sympathy taken on her and...

Sam W. Pisciotta (14:07.238)
Yeah, she, you know, in this particular story, her father is having a discussion, and he stopped time, and Apollo is frozen at the moment when they're talking, and he's like, he's going to get you, like there's nothing you can do about this. And she's saying, well, here's what I can do. I can transform into this laurel tree that will outlive him and his, you know, whatever, the myth of him. And

Deborah L. Davitt (14:35.075)
Mm-hmm.

Sam W. Pisciotta (14:35.742)
So there is some, I mean, I tried to give her some agency, but yeah, it's still problematic. And a lot of the stories can be that. So the other thing I think is that with some of these traditional stories, they are didactic and they are, you're trying to learn some moral lesson, they're trying to teach in some way. And it's often through plot and heavy theme. And for me, modern writing is really,

Deborah L. Davitt (14:42.839)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (14:59.323)
Mm-hmm.

Sam W. Pisciotta (15:03.946)
especially spec fiction now, is moving towards that literary model where character is really what's important. And so for me, retellings or spin-offs or just utilizing myth as a scaffolding still comes down to character. You have to build character. That's what it is.

Deborah L. Davitt (15:30.931)
Yeah, you do. Robin, you were sort of nodding along. Did you have something to add?

Robin (15:35.463)
Yeah, a thing I really like to do to make sort of mythological and folk stories newer is really reimagining them in historical setting. So like, I mentioned that one that's a retelling that's hard to spot, because I set it as like an imaginary potential historical inspiration for the myth. And it's in...

Deborah L. Davitt (15:45.955)
Mm-hmm.

Robin (15:56.768)
something that if you squint does look like the prehistory of Greece and Central Europe, Central Asia. And I think that's really powerful. I have a story that has not sold that I really like that imagines Atlantis in a place where there were a bunch of humans on land that actually did sink beneath the waves in a big calamity in what's now Doggerland between Britain and Holland. And there were a bunch of people lived there.

Deborah L. Davitt (16:19.989)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (16:23.787)
Doggerland is fascinating.

Robin (16:26.44)
And then that flooded. And we know now that it flooded pretty catastrophically at the end in a couple of big glacial calving events while the seas were rising after the ice age. So like, I really think it's fun to take these stories that are set in a very, in a mythic past that's had its edges sanded off and try to place them in a much more specific and interesting place and time. And that's a way to make them feel different and more particular.

Sam W. Pisciotta (16:56.426)
Like a second world fantasy is like, or are these.

Robin (17:00.678)
Maybe secondary world, but only like I gave real K secondary world. So like, like halfway. Um, or just, or just deep past, which is like secondary world, because no one knows what it is.

Deborah L. Davitt (17:10.627)
Hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (17:17.215)
I'm gonna just throw in because it's my podcast and I can, that I have a story out this year in Lightspeed called Philoctetes in Kabul, where I take the story of Philoctetes, who was one of the people who was supposed to go fight the Trojan War, but was injured on his way to Troy and was unable to fight and was abandoned on the island. And until they were told, well, you need him.

Otherwise, you're not going to win the war. So then they came back for him and they had to convince him that in spite of the fact that you're still wounded, in spite of the fact that you're still suffering, we still need you and Hercules' bow. And they have to, even though he bears them a grudge and everything like that, they still need him. I found it very fascinating to move that into a modern context in terms of the soldier who's fought in Afghanistan and Iraq.

and him having flashes of the old legends and visions of being trying to die nice, diabetes and Odysseus trying to convince him to come fight, where it's really a couple of people from his old squad who are trying to convince him to come and fight with him them again, in spite of the fact that he's still wounded, in spite of the fact that he's still carrying all this PTSD and everything like that.

Jelena (18:27.612)
So, I think that's a good way to get some kind of a place where we can be accepted by the public. So, I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to be here.

Deborah L. Davitt (18:39.859)
It was an interesting way to interface the modern and the ancient at the same time. And I'm really proud of the story. So again, I will just shout out that it's out there and people can totally go read it, but it is a is.

researching that was a question of going and finding a just a story that people don't really read about in the school because philoctetes isn't even in the Iliad. He's not in the Odyssey. He's just this legend that's ancillary to them. And I believe there was Sophocles who wrote a play about him. And then after I wrote my story, then I read Sophocles take on him because I didn't want to have that contamination going.

at the same time as writing. But yeah, anyways. So on the subject of research, how do you approach folklore and prehistory research? I'm going to go to Jelena first for this.

Jelena (19:39.563)
Well, I work in a museum, so a lot of stuff comes to my desk directly, so I don't have to... But the thing is, you know, I love history. It's my passion and it's what I do. And I never get tired of reading about people.

Deborah L. Davitt (19:44.907)
Lovely. Don't have to go very far at all. Ha ha ha.

Deborah L. Davitt (19:58.039)
Mm-hmm.

Jelena (20:05.715)
And when it comes to history, I'm not a person who cares much about battles or revolutions and stuff like that. I mostly care about people and their lives. And so I very much like to read about people's destinies and about the way they lived in the past. And I like to imagine what their lives were like.

Deborah L. Davitt (20:16.204)
Mm-hmm.

Jelena (20:31.155)
And usually this is the start of my stories because they are usually rooted in history, in some very definite time and place in history. And so, I start with that environment and I try to think of a character who would want something or who would be in trouble or who would be, in some way motivated to move through that historical landscape.

Deborah L. Davitt (20:37.782)
Mm-hmm.

Jelena (20:58.527)
And so this is how my stories usually start. But the thing is, I'm a researcher. It's fairly easy for me to get the information I need, even though history is very tricky. And I mean, I definitely don't agree with Ridley Scott saying, you don't know that, yes, we do. But there are things you can, yes, we do.

Deborah L. Davitt (20:59.264)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (21:08.897)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (21:21.183)
Yes we do know!

Jelena (21:29.889)
I worked in London in Wellington Museum, so I know a fair bit about Napoleon. So yeah, we do know things about him. Yes. But the thing is, we know about him because he was, you know, a huge figure. We don't know many things about...

Deborah L. Davitt (21:35.675)
Yes! We do know a few things, yes! Good god! Don't get me started!

Deborah L. Davitt (21:50.423)
Mm-hmm.

Jelena (21:52.707)
ordinary lives and especially if you're writing fantasy and you tend to go back into medieval times, you know, you have writings, you know, you have sources, but when it comes to, you know, your usual day to day life, there's a lot of, you know, secondary world mumbo jumbo you have to come up with. And I know historians will... Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (21:54.69)
Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (22:18.379)
follow-up question for you. This is just for you because you talked about how you work in a museum. Have you ever had a piece of material culture come across your desk and that was just bam a story right there in your hands?

Jelena (22:35.744)
Not a piece of material culture, but a piece of immaterial culture. I know we're going to talk about the story Immortelle. That is purely based on my museum experience, and I will tell you a few more details about it later.

Deborah L. Davitt (22:45.402)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (22:49.559)
Beautiful. Okay, then I will come back to that and we'll move on to some other questions. How do you respectfully approach and utilize folklore from a culture that's not yours? And that's a big question. So I'll throw that open for anybody who wants to start with that one.

Robin (23:14.268)
I mean, I'll say I basically do not write stories that make use of stuff that I understand to be part of a living culture that isn't mine as much as possible. That's one of the reasons I really like doing prehistoric fiction, because I am often working with material that does not have an inheritor culture, basically. You know, if I write a story set in Sumeria or set in...

Deborah L. Davitt (23:26.577)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (23:32.497)
Hehehehe

Deborah L. Davitt (23:39.53)
Yes.

Robin (23:44.78)
the Neolithic in Ireland, there is not a living culture today that has inherited those traditions. I'm not using anything that is sacred to someone who is alive today to be harmed by it. So like, I'm really interested in the archaeology and the native history of North America.

Deborah L. Davitt (23:56.049)
Mm-hmm.

Robin (24:09.264)
And only a very little bit of that will ever make it into my fiction, because so much of it belongs to people who aren't me. That's like, that's why I do most of my most of the folklore I use is I'm like, yeah, no, this is mine. I this I can use it, it belongs to me. And with other things, like my biggest my biggest strategy is just to reach far enough back that it's not what someone cares about now.

Deborah L. Davitt (24:14.157)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (24:17.908)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (24:29.087)
Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (24:35.882)
Mm-hmm.

Sam W. Pisciotta (24:40.558)
Yeah, I agree that it's a problem to delve into the cultures that I'm not familiar with because I don't have the closeness to them to maybe even be respectful or know that I'm not being respectful if I am. So I tend not to. I will base those things on European culture. That's where my roots come from, Italian.

Deborah L. Davitt (24:41.175)
Okay.

Sam W. Pisciotta (25:10.222)
Celtic. And then also, because of the community I grew up in, I'm also very comfortable with Hispanic culture and Latinos. And I'm a part of my family, my friends, I grew up in the culture with the language and food and everything. So I think when I do use that, I'm able to do it respectfully because I grew up around it. So I feel comfortable even though I'm not Hispanic.

Deborah L. Davitt (25:22.892)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (25:34.915)
Mm-hmm.

Sam W. Pisciotta (25:40.818)
I do want to use characters from other cultures, you know, and I try to educate myself to do that as well. But in terms of the folklore, or specifically like writing to satirize something about. So I might feel comfortable about writing in a Latino culture, but I wouldn't ever satirize it in some way, like much easier, or whatever that is. That's not my place to do that. But...

Deborah L. Davitt (25:44.419)
Mm-hmm. Oh, yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (26:05.847)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (26:12.243)
Jelena, did you want to add anything to that?

Jelena (26:15.383)
Yeah, I mean, I try not to touch the cultures which are not connected with my own, which I mean, sometimes I would like, for example, as Robin said, write something about prehistoric cultures, you know, which have no living descendants today. But in a way, I'm very privileged because, you know, the place where I live has been a melting pot.

of cultures for again thousands of years. So we had Greeks and Romans and Slavs and Italians and Austro-Hungarians and everybody else. So basically I don't have to look very far if I want to use a slightly different culture. But I try not to touch the cultures I don't understand. I don't think that would be fair.

Deborah L. Davitt (26:44.684)
Mm-hmm.

Robin (27:06.844)
Yeah. I realize another very important thing I realize is sometimes I rely on an editor who can check that I've done things correctly, you know. I can't afford and I think most of us can't afford to get a sensitivity reader for every short story. But like, I have a story out in fantasy and science fiction last month. And

Deborah L. Davitt (27:06.899)
Yeah. Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (27:15.063)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (27:24.321)
No.

Robin (27:32.18)
It's very good that I published that with Shuri Thomas and there are other editors who I would have been much more trepidatious about publishing it with without a sensitivity read. Just it deals with a lot of race in America stuff and similarly like publishing in a venue where you know there will be someone to check your work is a really powerful way to make sure you're doing it right.

Deborah L. Davitt (27:42.742)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (27:53.875)
Yes, yeah, we do rely on the community sometimes to make sure that we're doing things the right way.

Sam W. Pisciotta (28:01.154)
Yeah. The other thing I would say is like, it's probably a reason why I do like to look for the archetypes and the universals that prop up stories so that I can do my own thing as well, you know, so and create my own mythology, which I did in the song of Nix or something.

Deborah L. Davitt (28:16.779)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (28:22.403)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I love that story. We are going to be talking about that one at some length. All right, we are going to switch over to talking about each other's stories. This is the mutual admiration part of the podcast. We're going to start with Clever Jack Heavy with Stones by Robin Duncan. This appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies issue 304, May 21st, 2020.

Sam W. Pisciotta (28:26.999)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (28:47.295)
And I will, I always put links to the stories below the podcast itself. So if anybody wants to go read this by all means, go do so. It's really good. Clever Jack has been raised almost as a brother to Roland and noble son. They've played together, learned together, done everything together until Roland at the age of 14 is married to a noble woman 10 years older than he. She regularly shames him for acting like a teen boy until he goes to chase a ball, withershins around a church at her urging and promptly vanishes into fairyland. As a result.

Jack urges the wife, Mary Ann, to go after him. And then after some soul surging, asks his mother and the village witch for advice, and he receives gifts and stories to keep him safe in the fairylands himself. He goes through into fairyland, rescues Mary Ann from McKelpie, and then they reenact what I perceived as the story of Tam-Lyn, except for the fact that it's a gray king who wants to keep rolling for himself as a sacrifice against the sun. Mary Ann all.

The co-host manages to hold onto Roland as he changes shape, but lets go when he's transformed into a baby that would have been a vision of her future child with him. Jack proves his love for Roland by holding no matter what shape he's transformed into, from a scalding cauldron to a naked sword. Marianne agrees to stay in Fairyland to meet the Grey King's Law, captivated by the Fairy King's beauty, while Jack and Roland return to the mortal realm, hugging and holding hands along the way. I thought this was a beautiful story, and there's multiple levels of folklore used in it.

salt for purification, iron hobnails on the shoes, iron knife in the hands to defend yourself, refusing to eat fairy food, refusing to kiss a fairy maiden, and so on. From what stories, other than the obvious debt to Tamlin, did you take elements from the story and how did you make it your own?

Robin (30:27.888)
I mean, part of it was just that this is a huge mashup. I got as much as I could into it. Um, the opening of the story, um, is most commonly referred to as child Roland and bird Ellen, um, where someone goes with her shins three times around a church and is taken by the king of the elves. Um, uh, I read it as a song by Martin, Carthy called Jack Roland, which is great. And it has like the youngest brother going out to do the deed and it's got a

Deborah L. Davitt (30:33.505)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (30:45.036)
Okay.

Robin (30:55.872)
shape-changing duel at the end, I like that. There's a brief nod to true Thomas in The Choice of Roads in Fairyland. There's the desire of a king of the elves or the underworld to have someone else fight against the sun is from the first branch of the Mabinogi, so like an old Welsh myth. Yeah, yeah he's there standing in for Pwyl, Prince of Diffid.

Deborah L. Davitt (31:04.887)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (31:17.023)
Oh, thank you. I really wanted to know about that.

Robin (31:25.undefined)
in that little part and the frame of the relationship with the older the older noble woman and the teen husband is a song called the trees they do grow high where which is in the voice of the wife complaining that she's been married to this young man and then coming to love him and then in the song he dies but she's having a kid and she's happy about it for some reason

Deborah L. Davitt (31:37.576)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (31:51.383)
Hmm

Robin (31:52.276)
I thought it was a neater end if she could just like marry someone who wasn't way too young for her. That seemed just nicer for everyone involved to me. I should also say I wrote this story at a point where I was like kind of discovering my own queerness so it's got this little tentative very young queer relationship in it and part of that just reflects what was happening largely subconsciously for me at the time I wrote it.

Deborah L. Davitt (31:58.023)
Hahaha!

Sam W. Pisciotta (31:59.406)
Yeah.

Sam W. Pisciotta (32:03.19)
That seems well plotted because of them.

Deborah L. Davitt (32:14.716)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (32:20.163)
Okay. While it is a less problematic end for her to presumably marry the Grey King, if he was looking for a sacrifice, there's part of me that's going, this doesn't bode well for her. Was that intentional or not intentional?

Robin (32:39.324)
I mean... I don't think I really intended a hugely sinister end for her, but she kind of gets written out because I'm very focused on the friend. Two nice boys.

Deborah L. Davitt (32:50.163)
Yeah, you had to focus on where you wanted to go.

They are two nice boys.

Robin (32:58.452)
I also nearly accidentally referenced another folk song. I had to rename the kid's father after someone pointed out that I had used a name that would reference another folk song that I did not wish to bring in.

Deborah L. Davitt (33:07.352)
Oh no.

Deborah L. Davitt (33:14.147)
Oh dear. Oh, I love the way the brain works though. It's almost completely subconscious sometimes because your brain just latches onto patterns and you put it in and then you go, wait a second, no.

Sam W. Pisciotta (33:15.714)
So this is.

Robin (33:24.884)
I dunno. Yeah.

Robin (33:30.861)
No, I didn't mean that.

Sam W. Pisciotta (33:32.482)
So this does have a lot of Easter eggs in it, really. And that was one of the things that I loved about it was that you have that structure, but you touched on all of those elements like salt and iron, and it just felt old, like an old story to me.

Deborah L. Davitt (33:36.168)
Yeah, that's delightful for the reader.

Deborah L. Davitt (33:51.763)
It did. It has that fairy tale feel. And while it has modern elements, because it does remove some of the things that would have been problematic and makes them more up to date, it still has that old feel to it. It has a patina to it, which is really nice. Jelena.

Jelena (34:10.351)
I think it's very persuasive as a fairy tale. I mean, I read it a couple of times, and first time I just read it for the... You know, it was really lovely on the first read, like a multi-layered cake filled with all these goodies and beautiful images and Easter eggs and things like that. And then it took me several times to start...

deconstructing it in my head because it's so seductive that it just pulls you in and then you know you have to concentrate to see all the elements so I really love that aspect because it's so like it's so well put together it's just it's very it looks like a proper I don't know if that's you know a proper fairy tale that that's what I would I wanted to say like it has the feeling.

Deborah L. Davitt (34:42.095)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (34:58.141)
It belongs in the Grimm's index.

Robin (35:03.24)
I mean, I deal with a lot of cross references if it's going in that in there.

Deborah L. Davitt (35:03.808)
Jelena!

Deborah L. Davitt (35:09.492)
Yeah. Jelena, you promised you would talk to me about immortel, which appeared in the dark. And I'm going to summarize it briefly. The summary is not going to be anywhere near as effective as the story itself, but we have to give the listeners some sort of a compass here. In this story, the daughter of a drunk who are the outcasts of the village is deflowered by the son of a local village elder.

Jelena (35:13.677)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (35:33.779)
after he showed her and her drunken father some human kindness. But then, because he's a little shit, he leaves two coins to pay for the privilege of having taken her virginity, which shows what she really meant to him. Finding herself with child, she endures beatings from her father for the shame she's brought on him. And after the child is born, she turns to the soon to be married young man for sustenance for her child and herself, and is murdered for her pains. On his wedding day, she returns as a ghost to confront him with his child.

Okay, you promised you, I'm just gonna let you talk and then I'll have some questions for you after that. Talk to me about how you came up with this.

Jelena (36:09.551)
So basically, this story is rooted in a real proper village that's nearby where I live. And the culture there is basically this culture that I'm describing, you know, it's very patriarchal. It's, you know, it's very sort of strange when it comes to morals and when it comes to traditions and things like that. But I've put some, I've put some several...

Deborah L. Davitt (36:25.251)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (36:35.681)
Mm-hmm.

Jelena (36:39.231)
actually aspects of our culture in there. The first one is we're a sheep breeding island, so there's a lot of reference to sheep, not just as animals, but also as Christian symbols, because throughout the story you have Christian holidays and you have Christian symbols. So the sheep, I mean the lamb, is on the one hand it's a symbol of Jesus, and on the other is the symbol of sacrifice. So it's something...

Deborah L. Davitt (36:46.147)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (36:54.37)
Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (37:08.323)
Mm-hmm.

Jelena (37:08.875)
It's something you sacrifice so that a new life could spring out of it. And also immortelle, as the name says, it's something that is immortal. It's believed to be a plant which is immortal because you basically can't destroy it. It just grows. But on the other hand, here in the sheep breeding country, it's seen as something that has no value because the sheep won't eat it. So people used to burn it. So immortelle is something which is

Deborah L. Davitt (37:25.395)
Mm-hmm.

Jelena (37:37.367)
both immortal and it has no value, which is basically the description of the girl in the story, right? So, you know, yeah, so there are several different layers to this story. But I mean, when I wrote this story, the setting was like completely clear in my head. Like I saw it. I know that church because I did my research there. I know that village. So it's a real place. And I could easily...

Deborah L. Davitt (37:43.52)
Oh, I love this!

Deborah L. Davitt (38:04.749)
Mm-hmm.

Jelena (38:06.439)
imagine that person living there and having that kind of life because probably there were many girls like her, maybe not with such gruesome ends, but who got in trouble in the same way and who couldn't solve their problems because they lived in such a backwards patriarchal society. So I think there are many... It's more like it's based on history with...

Deborah L. Davitt (38:18.558)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Jelena (38:35.483)
some elements of folklore woven in.

Deborah L. Davitt (38:39.843)
Mm-hmm. Well, I found it a luscious piece of dark fantasy. Was there anything else that you wanted to talk about in terms of the story, in terms of what you wanted people to take away from having read it, in terms of, well, really anything? Because I read the story earlier in the year for a different podcast and we didn't get to talk about it then. So getting to talk about it now is just a pleasure. So anything you want to say, I'm open to listening to.

Jelena (39:09.903)
It's just, as I said, I work in a museum and I often try to depict particular times and places and make people understand what it was like to live there. So it's not just showing people pictures or saying these were the people who lived here, but I try to portray a certain kind of life in a certain kind of society. And I think that from Immortelle, you can see it very clearly. They were...

incredibly poor, their life was incredibly hard, and it was incredibly unfair as well. So I think that's what I wanted. Unfortunately, I mean, it's not a story that has a happy end, but I think that in that setting, there is no happy end. There could be no happy end. So I want people to see what it was like, basically.

Deborah L. Davitt (39:46.753)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (40:02.211)
Mm-hmm. Well, it wouldn't appear in an journal called The Dark if it were something that has a happy ending. So

Sam W. Pisciotta (40:03.339)
Yeah, I think what

Jelena (40:08.83)
Exactly.

Deborah L. Davitt (40:10.839)
Sam, you were about to say something? Or was it Robin?

Robin (40:11.109)
But I.

Sam W. Pisciotta (40:12.234)
I was going to say, no, it was me. I was going to say that like what brought this story to life for me really is the character. Like you did a very good job of making us, putting us on the side of the main character and the protagonist. So that really ramped up the tension for me. I just, you know, it read easy for me because I cared about, you know, the protagonist and that I think is

Robin (40:13.985)
I think both.

Deborah L. Davitt (40:15.629)
Hehehe

Sam W. Pisciotta (40:39.67)
the transferring of story, those historical stories to contemporaries, I think placing the heavyweight onto the character really will get the contemporary reader. And I think that you did that wonderfully.

Deborah L. Davitt (40:52.754)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (40:57.952)
And Robin?

Robin (40:59.024)
I just want to say I love, as you talked about, sort of marking it in a very particular time and place, the way that all the time marking was just done with the liturgical calendar and there's no other like date reference. I thought that was really elegant.

Deborah L. Davitt (41:09.804)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (41:15.104)
Right, we're gonna...

Jelena (41:17.466)
It's not even so intentional, it's just the way those people lived. That was the only kind of calendar they had.

Deborah L. Davitt (41:21.217)
Yeah.

Yeah, and that's the only time, the only time of the day is when the bells ring and which prayers are being called for and it's a cyclic calendar that we don't really have anymore. We have a very linear calendar, but the medieval liturgical calendar and living by it is a very different experience.

Jelena (41:44.887)
I hear the bells every day where I live. We still have them. And also, this is a very little morbid detail. My husband can tell, like if the bells sound outside the regular hours, you know that someone has probably died. And by the number of the bells, my husband can tell who died. I mean, whether it was a man from our town or a man from outside or a woman from our town or someone from...

Deborah L. Davitt (41:47.729)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (42:01.439)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (42:06.012)
Oh boy.

Jelena (42:11.783)
He can tell. I can't because I'm not a native there, but he can tell.

Deborah L. Davitt (42:14.951)
Yeah, that's a beautiful detail that would be a whole nother story as far as I'm concerned. I think you should use that as a prompt.

Sam, let's talk about Song of Nix, which is coming out in analog in January of 2024. So we get, we got a sneak peek at this and when it does come out everybody go grab this because this is a lovely story. Dr. Denny Adjuke has a neurological link with Nix, the last humpback whale on Earth due to the devastation by a virus. He is part of an effort to transcribe her species oral

While he loves working with her, Nix is restless looking for something new while his wife Sarah is also looking for something new, a new job far from the coast, which leads the couple into conflict. It takes a brush with death during a storm for Denny to let go of the old and embrace the new. So a lot of the story, like the backbone of the story is the folklore of the humpback creation myths. Was there a legendary basis that you leaned on or was this whole cloth invented out of your head?

Sam W. Pisciotta (43:24.354)
No, it was invented, but it's based off of mythologies and creation myths that I've read my whole life. And again, I'm trying to take those commonalities and universalities and bring them into the story. But I had to do some very specific things because this is not a human creation myth, it's a whale creation myth. So the story starts off with like...

Deborah L. Davitt (43:35.474)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (43:48.236)
Yes.

Sam W. Pisciotta (43:53.406)
the first one and her daughter, Anna, who live in the deep stillness. So I, I spent a lot of time researching like Inuit language to like come up with these names. Cause this is what I do. Like I'm just like, go down research halls. Well, just the thing well linguistically with the names. Yeah. So beyond that, no, I didn't, I didn't look at Inuit mythology or any of that.

Deborah L. Davitt (43:57.139)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (44:05.651)
Mm-hmm. I that's why I was gonna ask you is if there was any Inuit influence in the in the creation myths because it They sounded like Inuit names

Sam W. Pisciotta (44:23.99)
But I don't even remember what they were, but I remember spending quite a long time, and I'm sure they were something with light and beginning and things like that. That's just how I am. Like it's like it had to make sense to me, but once it did, like I don't care what it was, I just put it in. So then what I wanted to do is I wanted to create this world that it actually starts off on a somewhat Christian thing, because it's saying for you,

Deborah L. Davitt (44:39.296)
Yeah

Sam W. Pisciotta (44:53.042)
it's in the beginning, but for the whales, it's the day before yesterday. So, and that sense to me was like, when you say something like the day before yesterday, it becomes much more cyclical because then you're tight, well, what was the day before that? It wasn't the beginning anymore. It was just, that's when everything started. So, it becomes much more cyclical. But I had to do certain things like, song is very important with this and it's often sung.

Deborah L. Davitt (44:57.462)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (45:20.131)
Mm-hmm.

Sam W. Pisciotta (45:21.338)
mythology is sung because they're whales and that's whale songs. It's the important song is on mothers and the matriarchy. There's also the orientation for the deep stillness itself. So I had to place it in my mind. I placed the deep stillness was in the hierarchy was at the bottom and so when Ana goes into the great void she has to actually dive upwards and then she breaches

Deborah L. Davitt (45:29.845)
Mm-hmm.

Sam W. Pisciotta (45:52.166)
in order to create this new place. And so there was that, there's also an element of like, and actually transforms into the great mother. She's the daughter at first, and then she becomes the great mother of everything. And, but she's the creator, but she's also a trickster because she has to trick the great current into going into the void and all kinds of things. So.

Deborah L. Davitt (46:15.181)
Yeah.

Sam W. Pisciotta (46:17.418)
I did try to bring in sort of archetypes and things like that, but it's...

Deborah L. Davitt (46:22.803)
It worked really well. So what was the direct inspiration for this story of love and loss and renewal? What made you sit down and write this one?

Sam W. Pisciotta (46:33.97)
Yeah. Boy, you know, like relationships are important to me in that human element. When I write stories, like I do like write science fiction as well. And the science is for me, I do research it. But it is some hand waving as well, because for me, it's always about people. Like, I really want to place the emphasis on the characters. And I've.

Deborah L. Davitt (46:56.429)
Yeah.

Sam W. Pisciotta (47:02.618)
and you probably got that in my, what I've said, but so that relationship mirroring, like a transformation in the relationship of Denny and his wife, but the relationship of the whales are ending, the relationship is ending all kinds of, there's a parallel there and tried to bring that in. So, and then at the end.

Deborah L. Davitt (47:15.583)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (47:25.555)
You did a remarkable job in a very short space. This is not a particularly long story. I think it's like 4,000 words. So you got a lot in a little place, which is, again, it's remarkable. So I wanted to thank you for sharing it. And we got to read it first, guys. We got to read it before it's actually out.

Sam W. Pisciotta (47:43.553)
Nice.

Deborah L. Davitt (47:45.727)
We're going to bop back to Robin with Eat the World, which is appeared in Lackington's issue 25 in 2022. I absolutely loved this story. I'm just going to throw that out there. In this prehistoric tale, a Stone Age village of farmers and gatherers comes under attack by a hunting village on their border, because the young folks at the hunting village have been overwhelmed by the animal spirits in their masks.

A villager of the farmers and gatherers takes up a mask not made by their village, a spirit called Neverfull, and fights them, devouring everything in their path, including the life essence of the hunters, only to be felled by their own lover Atta, wearing the mask's stone splitter for strength, who then slips the masks off their face to free them of Neverfull. But there's an implication at the end that

they might still be they might still have some essence of the spirit in there they just they're not quite sure they just hope that they don't have this in them i thought the story was told with verve and presents a really original folklore sequence what gave you the inspiration for the story

Robin (48:51.932)
Funnily enough, this is in fact a story that is inspired by a very particular piece of material culture. I brought that up before. Yeah, so this story was inspired by a 9,000 year old stone mask, which is now in the museum. And it's real creepy. I tried to describe it as best I could for Neverfull. But these are some of the oldest masks in the world, this collection.

Deborah L. Davitt (48:58.728)
Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (49:08.491)
Beautiful.

Deborah L. Davitt (49:19.21)
Mm-hmm

Robin (49:19.872)
And they're from what's called the Ntoofian culture, which is also where agriculture was, as far as we know, first developed by humans. And you know, there are a lot of traditions about masks containing spirits and wearing them to become possessed by, to embody, you know, different supernatural beings. So I grabbed those. I also, there's crackpot.

religious history theory that the Dead Sea is the crater from the rain of fire that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah and that kind of also inspired me with the idea of Neverfull having come from the south and being this like ravenous salt water. That is not real archaeology, but it is a thing some people think that I think is cool of as an idea.

Deborah L. Davitt (49:56.931)
I'm gonna go get some water.

Deborah L. Davitt (50:03.253)
Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (50:16.155)
I love the fact that we have to put this in parentheticals. Please don't actually believe this.

Robin (50:19.38)
Yeah. Yeah, well, that was drunk. And I also want to just nod to Renit W. Sheldis, the editor of Lackington's. One of the reasons this story is so good is that she did an amazing job helping me with the prose on this story. One of the best editing experiences of my life. So like that's a big part of it. And, you know, I've done an amount of research about

Jelena (50:21.167)
I'm going to go to bed.

Deborah L. Davitt (50:40.32)
Oh, that's beautiful.

Robin (50:48.388)
Natufian culture and other contemporary cultures, the hunters were based on the people who built the Turkish megalithic site called Çatalhüyük, which was a site of monumental stone architecture and sacrifice definitely of animals, probably also of humans over several hundred years, where people who were not agriculturalists yet, who did not as far as we know live in settled communities, kept returning. They built this giant maze of stone pillars

Deborah L. Davitt (50:57.356)
Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (51:13.891)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (51:18.187)
I love this. This is something I don't get to talk about nearly enough.

Robin (51:19.488)
Yeah. But yeah, no. So this is like the Natufians meets Chattel Yook meets also Gobekli Tepe, which is depending on your definition, the first city humans ever built. Or it's a mega village, but it was like high density, beginning agricultural Southern Turkey, Northern Syria. Um, and so I thought like those cultures can encounter each other. Maybe they will encounter each other with terrifying things trapped in masks.

Deborah L. Davitt (51:27.779)
That's the one.

Deborah L. Davitt (51:51.949)
My next question is a little bit more mundane, but you talk about ancient proto-farming and ancient cooking methods in this story. And I wanted to know how you did the research for those.

Robin (52:04.212)
I listened to a huge number of audio books and podcasts. I cannot, I think I learned about sun baking bread though, from a man on Twitter who used to be a physicist and then was a video game designer and now tries to bake using ancient Egyptian yeast. But that method of sun baking bread over the day is one of the earliest baking methods we're aware of. And people still do it in Egypt today. They will lay their bread out on a flat stone with

Deborah L. Davitt (52:21.493)
Oh wow.

Deborah L. Davitt (52:30.294)
Mm-hmm.

Robin (52:33.156)
right exposure and in the evening it is baked. You have to live in the right part of the world to do that but you can't. So yeah I think that's where I learned about it rather than from one of my books. But I

Deborah L. Davitt (52:39.53)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (52:50.347)
Well, that changes how I was envisioning this, because I was envisioning this as being in some sort of forested area. And I was picturing this being a much greener area than Egypt. So now I have to re-read it. I have to punishment for me. I have to reread it and try and picture it differently. I have to change my imagination.

Robin (53:06.413)
What?

I have no idea frankly how much forest was around there at that time in that place. But I was imagining it as it's definitely, it's definitely a warm place with, with a, with a good deal of sun. Cause this is like, yeah, it's this place is, it would probably be Syria. Now the place where I imagine the story being set or Southern Turkey. Um, that's, that's like the, the confluence of that Highland hunter culture and the first farmers. Um.

Deborah L. Davitt (53:17.943)
Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (53:26.025)
Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (53:36.927)
Nice! All right, we're going to bop back over to Jelena and we're going to talk about your other story which is The Collector which appeared in the late lamented Cosmas infinities number six on December 12th 2021. And this is the story I said we were going to come back to because it talks about different gods. So Morana, a Slavic death goddess from Croatia, must make an alliance with

Jelena (53:55.183)
you

Deborah L. Davitt (54:05.019)
a death god of the Etruscans to save the soul of a follower of hers from Pluto, the Roman god of the dead. Their mutual target, as it were, is an old woman who fought oppression in World War II and who doesn't want to die, though she's in her 90s, but who really wants to go. But Pluto, posing as a doctor, is determined to keep her drugged until the moment she passes so that he can claim her soul. And her family, who are all Italian descendants of hers, side where the apparent power lies.

not with Morana, who wears the body of an elderly caretaker and companion from the old country. Eventually the old woman shoots the vessel carrying Pluto and she finds her way to a peaceful death in the hands of Morana, who gently takes her soul away." I found it interesting that the Roman gods in this story still had so much sway rather than the Christian faith. Why make that choice?

Jelena (54:56.803)
In this story, I completely ignored the Christian faith. I was, you know, I was, it's our world, but it's a sort of pagan, it's a sort of pagan world where there has never been, you know, a Christianity because otherwise it would obviously overpower everything else. But, you know, again, I started from two directions, both from, you know, mythology and from history, because

Deborah L. Davitt (55:06.836)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (55:11.075)
Mm-hmm.

Jelena (55:25.143)
The historical part here is real on two accounts. The first is that the city where this is set, Trieste, was basically a border city. So there are many Croatians and Slovenians live there, as well as Italians. And in World War II, it was also the Croatian partisans who liberated the city, so it wasn't just the Western forces. Yeah. So some of those people stayed there.

Deborah L. Davitt (55:37.726)
Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (55:49.123)
That's beautiful.

Jelena (55:57.336)
And the old lady in this story, Olga, she's one of those people, obviously. And also, the other historical, well, basically contemporary fact is that there's a lot of migrant workers going from Croatia to Italy, especially as we are a part of EU now and we can work there without a work permit. So, but the money is better. So there are many women...

Deborah L. Davitt (56:00.513)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (56:09.588)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (56:17.551)
Mm-hmm.

Jelena (56:21.731)
from these parts that go there and work as babysitters, nurses, caretakers, especially for old people, because demographic there is very old. The inhabitants of Fiesta are usually, there are many old people there, so they need women to take care of them. So that's a part of a very contemporary economic situation. So you have migrant workers going there.

Deborah L. Davitt (56:31.701)
Yeah.

Jelena (56:52.107)
So I was thinking, if I do a sort of conflict between gods, if I use old mythological creatures having a conflict over a soul, so they're all death gods, Morana, Aita, Pluto, they're all death gods, so if they were fighting over a soul, and if I had a Slavic god who had to go there to the territory, which is not hers,

Deborah L. Davitt (57:08.023)
Mm-hmm.

Jelena (57:20.979)
and collect a soul, what would she go as? And I thought, she has to be a migrant worker. That's logical because that's not her turf. And I think that, and I had to put it in some kind of disadvantage. And I think that was sort of the most fun part of the story. The fact that you have this hugely powerful, very old goddess in the body of a tired.

Deborah L. Davitt (57:30.144)
Okay.

Jelena (57:49.736)
migrant worker. I thought that was a you know pretty neat.

Deborah L. Davitt (57:52.391)
loved it. It gave such a spine to the story and everything else developed out of that the social economic disparity between her and the and the and the people of the family. It was everything developed out of that and it was wonderful. I have one other question for you and this one's going to bring us back into linguistics a little bit. Because there's not much known about the faith of the Etruscans. There are people largely erased from history because their writing and language which is supposed to be

a pre-Indo-European one, isn't translated other than about 100 to 200 words. Where did you get your information about Aita? Is he invented? Did you happen to have something in your museum that came up about him? I want to know.

Jelena (58:37.851)
Just different books on mythology. I dug him from some book. I can't quote right now which book it was, but I did look through their mythology and although it's not 100% sure that it was him and it was actually his name, it was one of the options given in that book. So I said, okay, it's good enough because we don't know enough. So I just use him because of that.

Deborah L. Davitt (58:47.489)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (58:59.596)
Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (59:03.659)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (59:09.111)
These are things I wonder about as I'm reading. So thank you very much for shedding a little light on that. I appreciate it. We're gonna bop back to Sam and we're gonna talk about a flash fiction, which is Island of the Dolls, ghost lore anthology by Alternative Stories Podcast, April 1st, 2022. And this one has the distinction of being modern folklore. This, I started reading this, I'm like.

I read about this on Atlas Obscura. So I was like, yeah, I recognize this reference. So as Easter eggs go, this was successful. Set on the Island of the Dolls in Mexico and partaking of its lore, a caretaker who swore he'd heard a girl crying for her doll and then found her dead body later has placed hundreds of dolls and doll parts around the Island to appease the girl's ghost. The dolls have never seen the ghost, only the spirit of Coyote, which comes to take them one by one.

Maya, one of the dolls, sings a lullaby to soothe the ghost despite the danger from Coyote, and the girl's spirit appears, chasing off Coyote and letting her and the doll sing together until morning. Sorry about my mispronunciation of Coyote. I was picturing it as the N'Hadl word, which is its original, and I immediately started going to the wrong language for it, and I do these things occasionally because I'm an idiot.

Anyways, I again, I enjoyed the story you successfully got you successfully got me to go. I know this I recognize this reference. The story takes a real place in the urban myth that sprang up about it and makes it something fresh and new. How do you handle urban legend differently than older folklore or do you? Is it the same thing for you?

Sam W. Pisciotta (01:00:30.298)
I think I got that.

Sam W. Pisciotta (01:00:50.834)
Yeah, it's the same thing, I think, for me. This is the only time I've done it. And I didn't approach it any differently. A lot of it's based on research to make sure that I get the area around Xochimilco right, and what the island looked like, and what vegetation is on the island. I wanted to make sure all of that was right. And so I just approached it as,

Again, rather than approaching it from the caretakers point of view, I shifted it to the dolls point of view and made it a story about character again. So Maya is listening to the ghost of this girl and all the dolls here every night, the girl singing. And...

And then I took the story from there and then brought in Coyote. So, you know, so they, that evil spirit isn't part of the urban legend, but I brought it in.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:02:02.539)
All right, this is the part of the podcast where we stop doing the mutual admiration society and we will talk about other people's stories. We actually have two stories this week that were recommended by people joining the podcast and both of them are very interesting. The first one I like a lot better than the second one, but that could be my personal biases speaking. So I'll be interested to see what you guys think.

about the second one, but we're gonna talk about Re-slash-Union by L. Chan, which appeared in Clark's world in April of this year. Sharon is the only living member of her family that bothers to dine with a Shen Pai, the algorithmically generated spirits of the dead created from people's online presences and digital records on Lunar New Year each year. She's the only descendant who can be bothered, and yet, because the Shen Pai cannot create new memories, there's no recognition of this fact, no appreciation.

Every year she tries to create a traditional Peran Ken dish that her mother never gave her the recipe for digitally so these digital ghosts can sample it. And every year the burden of her mother's disapproving sniffs grows heavier. This year she explodes at the ghosts, as so many of us do over the holidays. And this time her mother apologizes, they reconnect, and her mother tells her the secret of her recipe. But that recipe was never noted down in any of her files.

I really enjoyed this story, which conveys great emotional depth and realism while just hinting at the possibility of the reality of the ghosts at the end. What did you take away from his linking of the digital future and the folkloric past? And I'll open this up to anybody who wants to talk about it because it was a really fun story to read.

Robin (01:03:39.904)
One of the thoughts I had, like right after reading it, was that this technology sort of short circuits the folk process, right? Like with the prior generations there to critique you, that's like, that's pretty much the opposite of the folk process where you get, where each iteration transforms things so that they continue to evolve with the people in the culture, you know? Like and-

Deborah L. Davitt (01:03:47.756)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:04:01.62)
Mm-hmm

Deborah L. Davitt (01:04:06.623)
it freezes it in place.

Robin (01:04:07.828)
Yeah, I thought that was really interesting that it's like technology in this case actually kind of opposes that gradual evolution that is how traditions naturally pass.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:04:20.035)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:04:23.591)
Interesting. I like that thought. If anybody wants to pursue that thought, or just speak about the story in general, by all means.

Sam W. Pisciotta (01:04:29.11)
But they kind of.

Sam W. Pisciotta (01:04:33.442)
But then at the end we sort of see that the characters are finding a way to express themselves as well, right, and come through. So there's not, there's, they don't remain stagnant, that there's growth. Now, it's also...

Deborah L. Davitt (01:04:51.203)
If there is growth, is it supernatural or is it actually coming out of the digital? Is the fascinating question there. Because the story literally says that they cannot make new memories. That that was something that they had experimented with and they had deliberately locked that out because they started to see them go insane because they were making too many new memories and they were starting to get too much self-awareness and everything like that. So is this

Sam W. Pisciotta (01:04:58.433)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:05:18.727)
real? Is this just fantasy? Is this the real life? I don't know.

Sam W. Pisciotta (01:05:21.582)
Yeah, it's true. Is it the protagonist who's just reading her own desires into it? It could be that as well.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:05:30.259)
Yeah, that's a possibility too. Jelena?

Jelena (01:05:34.239)
I must say that I didn't have a feeling that there was a ghost there present, but maybe because there are so many dystopian stories about artificial intelligence that I just assumed that the simulation has somehow evolved and started thinking for itself. I had the feeling that it was all basically a sort of...

main character either trying to fill in the gaps so that she could get some sort of resolution of a family conflict which would otherwise never be solved, or perhaps the technology did something weird. There was a glitch somewhere and it got her the ending that she wanted, basically.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:06:08.209)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:06:16.111)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:06:26.239)
I think the ambiguity of the ending is what makes this story just masterful because you can read it any of the ways that we've just talked about and they're all perfectly valid interpretations and they can all be valid at the same time. So the story just really, it hit home for me on multiple levels. So whoever suggested this one, raise your hand please. None of you? None of you suggested this one? How did this one get wind up in my inbox?

Jelena (01:06:54.703)
The ghost suggested it obviously.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:06:57.471)
Obviously, I don't know. I will have to investigate who sent this one to me because it is wonderful. The second story that we have is called His Thing by Yvette Lisa Nidlovo. I'm sorry if I butchered the last name. It appeared in Lightspeed, September, 2023, issue 160. Now this one I had some problems with, but those are personal bias problems because it's still spectacularly well-written.

Sam W. Pisciotta (01:06:57.742)
The author.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:07:25.579)
Rufaro is a green card bride from Africa taken from her village where she wasn't allowed to go to school by a local boy done well for himself in America. The older women of the village warn her before she gets married that every man has his thing, whether it's beating his wife or whatever else, and that she'll need to adapt their magical recipes to cope with whatever his thing is. Brian's thing is that he wants to break her for defiance. He keeps her chained inside the house of magic of his own, a baby doll chewing at her breast.

but initially allows her to read books online and read whatever she chooses. Her best friend Pinky gave her a magical rock before her marriage and this rock imbued with the power of the divine to eat that which is evil gives her the power to end Brian and find her freedom. My major problem with this story is that it comes perilously close to saying that all men are inherently bad, that they all have their thing and that...

the women of the village are right, and that every man has this thing in him that has to be overcome by magic or by determination by the woman that they're married to. That could be just a cultural thing though. So I'm willing to just take that out of the equation and just talk about everything else. It's got, it's skillfully, go for it.

Jelena (01:08:41.231)
I must very strongly disagree with you here, and it's not the context I saw at all. But it might be different background, it might be different culture, it might be just myself writing about patriarchy all the time. The thing about his thing...

Deborah L. Davitt (01:08:57.843)
as possible.

Jelena (01:09:02.651)
It's not about as I see it. It's not about individual men It's just that if you have a system where someone can literally buy their bride And she's at his mercy then it doesn't Really matter at all whether this man is good or bad or kind because he is Inside this system and he's a part of the system So it's the system which is which is bad and if the man benefits from it and if he you know plays along then

Deborah L. Davitt (01:09:12.023)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:09:23.496)
Okay.

Jelena (01:09:32.087)
Definitely yes, he has his thing and she has to do whatever she has to do because it might be you know a question of survival So it's not about you know, it's not about individual men. It's I think it's about the system

Sam W. Pisciotta (01:09:45.002)
Yeah, I think that you have that macro level and micro level. And when you go to the macro level, like an individual person, it breaks down. Because I know I'm not that way. I'm a part of patriarchy, I'm sure. But I don't chain my wife to the sink and all of those things. So nor would I. But I.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:09:45.308)
That's an interesting perspective.

Jelena (01:10:10.455)
Do you? Do you, sir?

Deborah L. Davitt (01:10:13.971)
I'm pretty sure he doesn't.

Sam W. Pisciotta (01:10:15.466)
But at the macro level, it does work. I mean, when you're talking about patriarchy, if you use those as symbols for the larger problem, then in that sense, I think that it does work.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:10:30.207)
Robin, you had a hand up because you wanted to interject something, so go for it.

Robin (01:10:33.96)
Oh, so like I, sidebar, I felt deeply unqualified to critique a lot of this story, just because I felt so culturally ignorant of the background it comes from. Um, but like the, the thing is I, I kind of agree with what Jelena says is like, it's

Deborah L. Davitt (01:10:44.undefined)
Mm-hmm.

Robin (01:10:53.396)
When you are a bought bride and when you are, when you're going into the situation where you have no power, your husband has ultimate power over you. Then he's bluebeard. And the question is, what is, which specific bluebeard is he? Right? Like everyone has a thing and it's you are now in, and part of it is like, if we think about this as a folkloric story, there isn't a folklore story about you have an arranged marriage and it's fine.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:11:04.805)
Mm-hmm.

Robin (01:11:23.672)
That is not important folklore narrative because no one needs an educational narrative about how to cope with that situation. They can figure it out on their own, but there are endless stories about. You have married a man who is a monster in some specific way. And it felt like the opening is just about like, so you might marry a monster. It's going to be important to figure out what specific kind, cause you have to do different stuff, right? Like.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:11:24.791)
No, there's never been one as far as I know.

Robin (01:11:52.3)
Werewolf different than vampire, different than ghost. What is your husband going to do? It might, it's going to be something. So be ready. And like, I like that. It's sort of like, we acknowledge that this is going to be a bad folklore situation. Unfortunately, the good folklore situation was not available due to patriarchy and economic inequalities. So good luck.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:11:55.659)
Hehehe

Deborah L. Davitt (01:12:02.276)
I like that.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:12:10.732)
Ha ha!

Deborah L. Davitt (01:12:14.979)
Ha ha!

Deborah L. Davitt (01:12:20.319)
We regret the inco- we regret the inconvenience. No, I appreciate you guys talking with me about this because this opens my eyes to different possibilities in the story. I really, I really do appreciate that. Alright.

Sam W. Pisciotta (01:12:24.711)
I think also that it...

Sam W. Pisciotta (01:12:34.238)
It's also not totally about like patriarchy. It could be just about power structure as well. Like not just, I mean, there is that in patriarchy, but also colonialism. And I mean, whenever you have someone who has all the power, I mean, that's the imbalance. And this story really addresses that. I know it's specific to patriarchy, but you can read it with a lot of different interpretations.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:12:48.951)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:12:58.815)
Yeah, agreed.

Jelena (01:13:00.043)
It made me think about a cultural thing. I'm not familiar with the culture this story, this particular story comes from, but I come from a culture where there is a huge amount of domestic violence and where at certain levels, women are still expected to stay at home and be housewives and things like that. So when you read those stories, or if you go 100 years back in these parts, all the stories are like that.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:13:26.659)
Mm-hmm.

Jelena (01:13:29.139)
So it's not even what kind of monster your husband is. It's just that he has the power to be any monster he likes, and you have absolutely no power to stop him. That's the thing. It's not saying, again, I go to macro picture. Again, I go to the structure. It doesn't really matter whether he wants to be the monster or whether he likes being a monster.

It's just that the society gives him the power to be if he wants to be, and there is nothing you can do about that. That's, I think that's the real horror of that story.

Robin (01:14:06.284)
Yeah. I mean, it's like the bride price connotes ownership of the thing purchased. Right. And that, so like that is that there is that absolute imbalance. If you are, if you are a bought spouse, then you are an owned spouse. And that's, and that is, that is a power structure that cannot be comfortable and equal.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:14:07.072)
Okay.

Sam W. Pisciotta (01:14:23.636)
It's the-

Sam W. Pisciotta (01:14:29.534)
It's the placing of the two silver coins and the story by, right.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:14:29.668)
No, absolutely not.

Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:14:37.483)
by Jelena, yeah. All right, we're gonna start winding this episode down. So what's next for each of you? What do you have coming out soon or out recently that you'd like people to read? I'm gonna start with Jelena, because I know that you have your, something from Ghost Orchard Press, and I promise you, I will get to reading it. I have a three week gap after the next episode, so I will be taking a peek at stuff that I've not been having the time to hit.

and your story is on the list.

Jelena (01:15:09.355)
Well, you know, Sam read it and he left a review on Amazon, so he's my hero right now. So yeah, thank you, Sam. So yeah, that's my novel, Darkwoods Deepwater, which is a dark fantasy novel, which came out in September this year from Ghostokidpress. But also there is something new. It's still like hush hush, but I think there will be a novella coming soon also from Ghostokidpress.

Sam W. Pisciotta (01:15:16.853)
Yes, beautiful.

Jelena (01:15:40.313)
So, for me, yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:15:42.807)
Congratulations, that's a heck of a way to end the year. All right, Sam, what have you got out recently or coming out soon that you'd like to talk about other than Song of Knicks?

Sam W. Pisciotta (01:15:54.91)
Well, I just had a story released in fantasy and science fiction, Los Pajaritos, and you can find that in the November, December issue. Then I also have a song called the, or a story called The Moonlight Eels coming out in newmyths.com that should be coming out in a week or two online there. It should be free to read. And then fairly soon.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:16:07.287)
Okay.

Sam W. Pisciotta (01:16:24.034)
Breakfast and TikTok is coming out, Penumbra expected of fiction. So, a few things coming out, I think.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:16:30.711)
That sounds interesting. Robin, what do you have out recently or coming up soon that you'd like to promote?

Robin (01:16:37.417)
When does this air so I know if one thing will be out or not?

Deborah L. Davitt (01:16:41.472)
Um, let me see. You guys are... okay the next episode is the 13th, you guys will be the 20th.

Robin (01:16:48.484)
Okay, so yeah, still coming out when this airs, I'm actually releasing an original story in my newsletter which will come out at the end of December, because it is super difficult to find a paid publication opportunity for a 9000 word Christmas portal horror folk carol novella or novelette. So if you like, if you like folk carols, and you like

Deborah L. Davitt (01:17:10.711)
But I want to read it now.

Robin (01:17:17.796)
and the horror of gender essentialism specifically, you might like forthcoming in my December newsletter which I will probably send out on the 29th, my story, The King of All Birds, which I've been trying to sell for a couple years and it's not happening so this year everyone gets it. You can sign up for my newsletter over on my website, I send it once a month. It has a poem.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:17:41.884)
Hahaha!

Robin (01:17:47.052)
this time a story. I'm also in that issue of FNSF with Sam. My story's called Meeting in Greenwood, and it's about traveling into the underworld by train to meet with a contact and try to stop Richard Nixon from making an alliance with the Confederate dead in 1968. And I expanded it into a novella that I hope someone will buy.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:18:16.131)
I love this. Okay. Thank you all for having been on the podcast. I really appreciate your time. Next week on Shining Moon, we will switch back to environmental concerns with Priya Chand, Flores Kleiner, Tanuka, and Amelia Gorman. And that will be our last episode of the year, scheduled for the 27th. And then we will be diving into January with taking a look at flash fiction and what it takes to write flash because...

Codex Writers does a flash fiction contest every January and we're gonna catch everybody while they're writing and everything is fresh in their heads. So thank you all very much and we are out.