I have been away in Berlin on my first trip to Europe in 14 years, catching up with my cousins on both sides and taking care of family business, hence I am a bit behind with updates here, there and everywhere.
Here is the Harvesting The Moon Order Link, posted on the publisher’s website. My second story collection was a long time coming but totally worth the wait with its gorgeous cover by Quebec illustrator Francois Thisdale and remarkable intro by my old friend (and publisher) Candas Jane Dorsey. It’s listed on Amazon but not available (yet) for purchase except from Britain’s storied PS Publishing, who, among countless other magical things, published a 50th anniversary reissue of Dandelion Wine. How cool is that?
Britain is far away from Canada and the US so if anyone is interested I’ve had a case shipped to me at home in Norwood. I’ll gladly send you a signed copy–they are beautiful hardcovers. I’ve also written a preface, where I talk about process, teaching, and beetles.
Harvesting the Moon, like its predecessor After the Fires is comprised of previously published stories, work that has appeared for decades in publications including Strange Horizons, Tesseracts, Clean Sheets, Fantasy, Leviathan, Postscripts, Transversions and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, among others.
Advance praise from Jeff VanderMeer:
“Among our best writers of surreal and fantastical short fiction. Ursula Pflug’s stories in this collection will rewire your brain and make you see the world in a different way. Beautifully written. Highly recommended.”
Jeff VanderMeer
From Candas Jane Dorsey’s beautiful intro:
What’s familiar in Ursula’s work is often the most profoundly strange to me too: the city through the dream, the spontaneous mysticism, the bravery in the face of revolution, the urge to childbirth.
Maybe the amount of my own fiction that began by bursting through from dreams with colours unseen in the waking world has opened my awareness to how much of her fiction comes through those same mysterious doors. All of her work, whether realistic, futuristic or fantastical, has a tone of emerging from a dark mystery, as if it is reclaimed, sentence by magically-realist sentence, rescued, in fact, from a well of history.
If it is a well, an unfamiliar metaphor for me who was born and raised in a city, it is a deep, mysteriously-familiar well—but dark and dangerous too. It is the well where the giant cockroaches or the dying fish come from, the well in which, perhaps, one’s childhood friend once drowned. Or let the metaphor be the land, a field, a woodland prairie. If so, it is a land at once bright with sun and dark with the knowledge of what is buried there. I’m always surprised again that in her hands, the darkness remains deep, but not despairing, helping me understand yet again that dark journeys are simply part of life.
The people and things and times we love die all the time. Being born is beyond our control, but the rest of it is, in one way, all about dying. Parents, children, lovers, sisters, brothers, rock stars, saints, heroines and heroes, cats and dogs, entire decades, entire countries, entire worlds—they all disappear into what Samuel Delany called “the great rock and the great roll”. Our entire history is a vortex pulling everything down in a blur of memory.
Ursula Pflug knows a lot about that vortex. Her stories are full of sadness and loss, and yet, I feel as if they are returning to me so many things that life makes us lose. Reaching into the vortex of the past, Ursula comes up with an incredible salvage of heart, humanity, imagery and truth. The real stuff.