Tag: fiction

A Rescue Remedy, Part I by Barbara Ardinger

A year, now. It has been a full year since the phony election that put El Presidente in the Golden Office. A year since people began leaving the capital and the nation’s other large cities. While some of the refugees emigrated to quasi-democratic nations, most of them settled in the small towns and on the farms across the countryside, where they began building new, rural lives. A year ago, it was a flood of refugees. Now fewer people are able to escape.

A year, now, and even though she has studied and practiced, the wicked witch is no wickeder than she ever was. Nowadays she even forgets to put on the wicked-witch mask that she used to think scared people. But it’s easy for everyone to see that, masked or not, she’s just an ordinary woman practicing an old-time religion. She’s never fooled anyone, not the sixty or so refugees who now live on her farm, especially not the various ravens who drop by regularly for snacks in exchange for gossip.

Continue reading “A Rescue Remedy, Part I by Barbara Ardinger”

Are These Three Novels Prophetic? Part 3: The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk by Barbara Ardinger

Members of this community (and others) have been feeling that the world is out of balance since the 2016 election. There’s a feeling that people are becoming less kind and that some men (following the model that lives and tweets in the White House when he’s not at one of his golf resorts) are more misogynistic. I’ve heard that Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eight-Four is more popular than ever before. We seem to be living in a new dystopia. It’s very sad and very scary.

I’ve recently reread three novels written by women that I think may be both prophetic and inspiring. I’m hoping that if you read them, too, you’ll inspired by their brave heras to keep on resisting. The novels are Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (1996) by Sheri S. Tepper, Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) by Marge Piercy, and The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993) by Starhawk.

Starhawk (Miriam Simos) was probably the most famous “out” witch in the last quarter of the 20th century. Her book The Spiral Dance (1979) introduced uncountable numbers of people to the Goddess, Paganism, and Witchcraft. Nowadays, she’s teaching “Regenerative Culture, Earth-based spirituality, and Permaculture.” She is no doubt working up to the Uprising described in The Fifth Sacred Thing that separated northern and southern California—a generally bucolic San Francisco filled with Pagans and an eclectic mix of every other religion with free healthcare for all and a City of Angels (Los Angeles) filled with Stewards, ruins, and sex slaves.

The Fifth Sacred Thing opens in 2048 with Maya, a 98-year-old Orthodox (sic.!) Pagan climbing a mountain. At the Lammas (August 1) ritual, she tells how the Uprising began. Global warming has happened, and during the drought of 2028, four old women (remember Tepper’s bag ladies?) went with pickaxes to a major thoroughfare in San Francisco, dug up the pavement, and planted seeds in the earth. The Uprising was led by people who had participated in the Summer of Love (1967) and demonstrated against the Vietnam War.

Continue reading “Are These Three Novels Prophetic? Part 3: The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk by Barbara Ardinger”

Are These Three Novels Prophetic? Part 2: Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy by Barbara Ardinger

Members of this community (and others) have been feeling that the world is out of balance since the 2016 election. There’s a feeling that people are becoming less kind and that some men (following the model that lives and tweets in the White House when he’s not at one of his golf resorts) are more misogynistic. I’ve heard that Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eight-Four is more popular than ever before. We seem to be living in a new dystopia. It’s very sad and very scary.

I’ve recently reread three novels that I think may be both prophetic and inspiring. I’m hoping that if you read them, too, you’ll inspired by their brave heras to keep on resisting. The novels are Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (1996) by Sheri S. Tepper, Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) by Marge Piercy, and The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993) by Starhawk.

The woman who is on the edge of time is Consuelo (Connie) Ramos, a Mexican-American who lives in a New York barrio and has a life so dreadful that even as Piercy describes the poverty and the abuse in exquisite detail, I can’t really see it…though I bet any homeless person who lives on or under a freeway overpass could add more horrific details. Connie’s father beat her, two of her three husbands beat her, her daughter’s pimp beats her. Her brother has anglicized himself by changing his name from Luis to Lewis. Her third husband was a blind black musician named Claud; it was while she was deep in mourning (and withdrawal) that she struck out at her daughter and injured her, which led to her first imprisonment (Lewis signed the committal forms) in an insane asylum that is immeasurably worse than, say, Dotheboys Hall in Oliver Twist. The bureaucrats who run the asylums have zero interest in their patients. If a patient complains of a burnt back (the pimp knocked Connie into a hot stove) or a headache, that patient is accused of making a “medical diagnosis.” The favored treatment? Huge doses of Thorazine, which has terrible side-effects. Connie finds herself “stymied, trapped, and drugged with Thorazine that sapped her will and dulled her brain and drained her body of energy.”

Continue reading “Are These Three Novels Prophetic? Part 2: Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy by Barbara Ardinger”

Buffy Vs. Bella by Anjeanette LeBoeuf

In the past four years I have become overwhelmed by society’s thirst for vampires. The introduction of True Blood, Twilight, and The Vampire Diaries has marked a downright fervor for anything and everything “vampire.” Now don’t get me wrong, I like a good vampire story now and again. One of the first books I remember reading solely on my own was Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I grew up watching the WB show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was a coup d’état that I got to watch a show that had very visible scenes of violence, evil, and death, but I’m pretty sure that my parents thought that if watching this show was my only act of rebellion, they were in good shape. What I remember most about watching Buffy wasn’t really that it was a show about vampires, but that it was a show about a strong high school girl that had to save the world — which is exactly what I wanted to do.

I have always gravitated towards the mythical and supernatural, which is one of the reasons I study religion in the first place. Society uses vampire stories as a way to transmit social critiques. Vampire stories began to expand on the common idea that women were easily seduced by the “dark side” and that a strong male would need to swing in to save the day. Continue reading “Buffy Vs. Bella by Anjeanette LeBoeuf”