Category: M L Clark
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On an Insect, a Rock, and Maybe a Human Being
1 Half a cockroach lies twitching at one side of the shower. A season of thunderstorms has sweetened the building’s pipes, driving her kind inward and up. Periplaneta americana seems more elegant somehow in Colombia: an outcome, perhaps, of the more evenly temperate weather shaping its behaviour, cultivating stately indolence. On the rare occasion when…
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Writing Futures from the Present
Lately I’ve been processing the strong possibility that I won’t get to keep my new home in Colombia (at least, not full-time for a few years), and it’s been difficult to focus on writing in the middle of this grief. Compounding that difficulty is the fact that I’m currently working on my entry for Grist’s…
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Lessons from Lessing: In Search of My Golden Notebook
I can’t remember who recommended Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962) to me as a teen, but I read it during a period when I was glutting myself on mid-20th-century British authors (Iris Murdoch and Margaret Drabble being two other stand-outs; Beryl Bainbridge, I’d meet only in my late 20s). The Golden Notebook is most…
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Please Be Honest vs. If You Loved It: On the Weird World of Reviews
I’m an odd duck of a writer in many ways. I love receiving feedback once a story’s published — whether it’s good, middling, or negative — but I cannot stand the idle critiques of careless readers when a work is in progress. (I’m thankful, then, to have found one beta reader who understands my aims,…
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The Debts We Owe & The Thanks We Give
I was never big into fan culture — never keen to get someone’s autograph, or be in the same room as a famous creator. I still cringe on the rare occasion when people suggest that might be something I look forward to myself — having a “fan club”. Oof. No. Can’t we all just be…
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Playing Around with Narrative Tropes
A few years back, a dear friend told me that he and his girlfriend had spent a night in a cabin with limited entertainment: VHS copies of Road House, and Ghost. “Awesome, so you watched Road House?” “No, she chose Ghost.” Ah. Of course. I’ve always leaned toward the action flicks, myself, and although my…
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The Writer Returns to the Scene of the Theme
So, it’s five days until Third Planet Fall Down releases, and I’m chuckling today over how difficult it is for a writer to escape who they are in their writing. The “work will out”, as the saying goes — and oh my, does it ever, when it comes to being made to confront our greatest…
Sí, Hay Futuros Ediciones 