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Photo by Devin Cooper, 2008 at the Getty Museum

You wore your hair in braids last night and now it’s doing that rippling thing that helps it to catch the sun. Leave it down. You have that loose dress that you never wear, but today’s the day. With the blue swing coat and that blue seaglass pendant. There’s that part of the movie when nobody knows she’s a mermaid but the hints are all there. Before the spell is broken, run your errands to the pharmacy and the bank. Beneath your sandals, all is sand and wonder.

The opaque orange tights don’t have to look vintage, you know. And you don’t have to pair them with something somber in order to get away with them. Yes, I know how old you are. Forget it. Get that red dress out of the back of the closet. Yes, the one that’s kind of mod. And the yellow jacket. Gold jewelry and pale gold eye shadow. It’s about time you allowed yourself to be the girl on fire. Yes, it’s very subtle. Yes, you can dye your hair. Fire doesn’t have to answer to anyone.

Those purple pants have been toned down for office wear far too often. Strip the blazer off and put on that ivory tunic that skims your hips. Yes, and the pearls. Sweep your hair up and lift your chin a little. Remember that one time that guy called you ‘regal,�� remember how it felt. Queendoms are often invisible. Little signs. Your jade bracelet and that antique signet ring that you bought even though nobody could make out the seal. It doesn’t matter now; it’s your seal. Press it into anything soft. Leave your mark.

‘Mannish�� is a word people use because they’ve never learned to tell a woman she’s commanding or intimidating. You loved that outfit; wear it again. The olive-green military surplus slacks from some cold country; the thick unbustable material that makes you feel pressed and rigid and perfect. That narrow tank top and your BSG dogtags that identify you as Kara Thrace, call sign Starbuck. No one will see them under the flak jacket; those are for you. Don’t let meekness put you in sneakers. Go out and find those boots. They exist just as you imagine they did; black and slightly less than shiny. Heavy. This isn’t cosplay. This is aspecting. Something in you speaks and says I WANT. Strut around like the killer that you are.

There’s that long skirt in the black and red stripes you’re worried will make you look like an exterminator’s tent. It won’t. Put it on under that long sleeved black top. The wind is already picking up at the changing of the seasons and it’ll lift your hair and make it look like you’re being carried down the street. This is the outfit you’re wearing when you pass that mother and her child. The child looks over her shoulder and says mommy look a witch. And the mother looks too, saying no sweetie there is no such thing as witches. But you let her see just a slice of your face through the blowing of your hair, let her see the wind drag you by your skirt again and you know she’s not sure of that. She’s not sure of that at all.

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That Lamy Safari has signed every book so far. That cuff is made of newspapers and bears my very own byline. Small talismans of a writerly life.

Invite all your friends. Convince yourself that if the gathering is mostly friends, you will feel less nervous. Forget to warn them that your work is entirely unsuitable for children. Make friends with the kids who get brought along anyway. Apologize profusely.

Drink. Buy too much wine. Buy so much wine that you will end up handing out bottles of nearly-full cold Riesling to random passers-by to their utter delight. Drink a great deal of the wine yourself. Drink that bottle of champagne you bought when your book was accepted by the publisher. You’ve been saving it for today.

Read. Choose an action passage, one that dives right into the horror of it all. Read loudly and clearly, defying the panic reflex that comes from all those eyes staring expectantly. See your friends react to your work in real time. Glory in that. Glory in all of this, once the alcohol hits your bloodstream. This is what you were always meant to be.

Watch your best friends appear in theme costumes. Pandora, Nietzsche’s Madman, Caesar from Planet of the Apes, the lost dinosaurs, all thoughtful and beautiful and staying after to clear the chairs.

Stephanie and David Foster, great writers and good friends.

Sell out all copies of your books. Sell copies to people you know already bought it, to people buying extras to give as gifts, to people who came a long way to see you. Sign them all with your special red fountain pen. To indeed be a god.

Do it again in a bar in Los Angeles, where it is easier than before. Do it with your publisher and other brilliant writers from your publishing house. Arrange to do it again and again. It gets easier every time, and somehow it also gets better.

Alexis Fancher: author of “How I Lost My Virginity to Michael Cohen: and other heart-stab poems��

Do it whenever possible. Never stop reading, never stop writing.

My friends are grand and amazing people. Author Jo Wu and mensch Isaac Wolf.

Reading at The Mandrake in LA, drunk on my own small fame.

Marie Lecrivain: poet, editor and publisher at Sybaritic Press

I don’t have many role models.

There just aren’t a lot of people like me. I see pieces of myself here and there; I take my examples from a wide and varied field of individuals who have some quality that I want to have. Rarely do I come across someone who is more than a few of those things at once.

No heroes. First, I want to be an original. Second, nobody’s whole life is enviable.

Margot Adler was an incredibly important force in my life.

I read��Drawing Down the Moon when I was 14 or 15. There was a tinkling, incense-scented occult shop in the town where I lived. They were remarkably tolerant about my reading habit. Or maybe they were just patient, because when I did have the money I delivered it to them with shocking regularity. I bought the regulation fetish objects for a teenage Pagan: a black-handled knife, ostentatious jewelry, candles and other things to burn. Mostly I bought books.

The two first books I read were by women. They had both been published on October 31, 1979. The first was��The Spiral Dance, which was my first official how-to-be-a-witch book. The other was Margot Adler’s��Drawing Down the Moon.

DDTM was not a how-to. It was written the way a journalist writes about religion, once she’s found it. She was somewhere between skepticism and the tone that I cringingly described as ‘woo-woo�� when I didn’t have the words for facile or sentimental prose in religious nonfiction. She connected her experience of ritual to scholarship; to her early fascination with mythology and compelling interest in the old gods found in childhood. She approached groups of witches and their practices in a way that I could relate to; cautious, but with an unfolding wonder.

The movement of Paganism as a religion is like the ocean on the cover of that book. I always imagined myself like the woman in the picture; like Adler herself. Casting my own circle, touched by those waves, but not caught in them. Allowed to be a skeptic, but deeply engaged and raucously in love with being a witch.

I met Margot Adler two years ago. I go to Pantheacon every year in San Jose. Mostly, I go for big ritual and the panels, not to spot celebrities. But I do see them. I’ve seen M. Macha Nightmare put her California poppy-tattooed wrists on the floor to show me how they grow. I’ve partied with Lon Milo DuQuette, who is one of the coolest men I’ve ever met. It was at his show that I first saw Margot Adler in real life.

She came into the outdated neon bar carrying a drink. She made her way into the pit just in front of the stage and spent the whole show hollering and cackling and whooping whenever the rest of us just clapped. She was irrepressible to the point that Lon told her is was too flattering and that his ego might crush the room. She was joy itself, unselfconscious, grey hair shining, beyond worrying what other people thought.

I was able to shake her hand and thank her for her Work. That was a good moment.

Margot Adler was my favorite kind of Pagan writer, which is to say: a writer who happens to be Pagan. She never hid from it, never shied from identifying herself. But she worked in regular press, with a regular job, being herself fully in public. She inspired me to look beyond Llewellyn and to bring my faith to what I write in a way that does not attract attention to itself or make itself anyone else’s business.

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I don’t have many role models. And tonight, I have one less left in this world.

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Alright, I googled this and I’m not the first person to come up with it. So maybe this is more well-known than I think it is, but when it occurred to me it seemed like a revelation.

So here it goes:

All of my colds start in my throat. I get the same tickly-dry sensation in the same place every time, and then my tonsils get inflamed. I’ll get them cut out one of these days, I swear. I used to drink cups of scalding tea to get at it, but while that feels good it doesn’t work. I end up miserably sick and full of tea. No win.

What is life why do I even.

But one day I got this idea. I thought about the experiments I had done in bio and bio-tech classes where we made bacteria resistant or transferred genes into it or watched whole colonies die based on the introduction of just a little salt, heat, alcohol, or acid. I had the eureka moment and headed for the bathroom.

No not for bath funtimes For SCIENCE.

I gargled with mouthwash obsessively, every few hours, for a day. I basically hit it every time I was in the bathroom for any reason. I gargled long and loud and hard, forcing it into the vault of my throat to the point of accidentally swallowing some.

I also verbally abused my resident infection. It went something like this:

I AM EVICTING YOU. YOU DO NOT LIVE HERE. THIS HOST IS DISAGREEABLE. I AM STRONGER AND SMARTER THAN YOU. I LIVE, YOU DIE. GIVE UP, YOU SHORT-LIVED MOTHERFUCKER, YOU HAVE ALREADY LOST. I AM GONNA UNFOLD YOUR PROTEINS SO BAD YOU’LL WISH YOU NEVER LANDED HERE. YOU WILL NEVER BEAT ME FOR I AM YOUR PLANET AND I WANT YOU DEAD.

I like to think the threats help.

As a veteran of endless colds that inevitably turn into bronchitis (thanks for the chain-smoking childhood, parental units!) I dread getting a cold with the serious resolve of someone who has listened to the whistle of her own pneumonia-fucked lungs and idly contemplated death.

If your colds are like mine, if you feel the warning tickle, hit the mouthwash. I buy the Target generic for Listerine and it works dandy.

Mouthwash is my cure for the common cold. May it serve you just as well.

This gif has no bearing, I just love it so much. SO much.

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I wrote a book. I am a novelist.

Heh. Add me on LinkedIn.

I started writing the story that would become The Book of the Unnamed Midwife last summer. I had the idea during finals and I set it aside, convinced that it would take over my life and make studying impossible.

I was right. As soon as finals were over, I hunched over my laptop for half a day and wrote the first 12,000 words in one go. I was extremely, incredibly fortunate to be in a short-term writing program at Cal at the time, and I workshopped those first pages with a sharp group of writers who gave me invaluable feedback.

One year later, my book has just been released by Sybaritic Press. It’s available on Amazon in both and formats.

But you hate Amazon! Or, you don’t have a Kindle! Or, you prefer to buy everything with cash! Fear not. You can also buy the book directly from me. I take cash, debit, credit, PayPal, Google Wallet, and Venmo, and I’ll sign it and get it to you wherever you are. And if you really want to read my book but have no money or very little money, let’s talk sliding scale/trade. I’ll have them in stock next week, and I’ll have signing and reading events in SF and East Bay soon.

(Book not shown actual size)

So what’s it about?

It’s about a world where there are hardly any women left, because of some terrible occurrences. I’m going to level with you: bad things happen. Trigger warnings* are in effect for rape, gang rape, human trafficking, and (spoiler alert kinda) FGM.

So why would I write about all that?

I wrote this book because I LOVE the post-apocalyptic genre. I read Y the Last Man and The Handmaid’s Tale and Alas, Babylon and A Canticle for Leibowitz and ��Children of Men and The Road and I loved them all. I watched The Walking Dead, fascinated not by how and why there are zombies (I couldn’t care less about the reason the world ended) but by how the group’s dynamics shift and change in the absence of the structures that teach us how to behave.

Let’s keep it subtle.

But most of these works do not account AT ALL for how different the loss of the modern world impacts women differently than it does men. Imagine if every woman you know suddenly lost access to birth control, and then lost any bodily autonomy that the rule of law and the decency of her community afforded her. Imagine if every woman on The Walking Dead somehow didn’t find the time to shave her armpits every week but spent her hours raiding pharmacies for the Pill and calculating how long before they all expire. Imagine that the structure in The Handmaid’s Tale that allocated the few remaining fertile women to the men in power never materialized and instead they were hunted and treated as a commodity.

These thoughts would not leave. So my hero was born.

Seriously don’t say I didn’t warn you.

She’s tough. She has some of me, some of my good friends, and some of the bad ass we all wish we were.

So, I have become the thing I always wanted to be. I became this with the help of people like my husband, John, who read this whole book out loud to help me edit it. People like and ��who wrote me book blurbs even though I asked during finals and gave them terrible notice. People like my publisher, , who is both sensitive and creative, but also an adept ‘bitchess�� as she calls it, and made this whole thing happen. People like who answered my endless questions about midwifery, and who helped the cover come into being. Thank you all from the bottom of my ink-and-paper heart.**

No, really, Meg. Your list is fascinating. Do go on.

This is where I ask for more favors, even though I have already had so much help. If you read my book, please please please review it. Review it honestly, I promise I will not hold it against you. (Unless you give it 1 star because it was delivered late, or damaged. Please report that to the seller and don’t torture my poor writerly heart.) Review it on Amazon, on GoodReads, on your blog, on Twitter, on Tumblr, on Reddit, anywhere at all. Tell a friend you read it. Shout it out of a moving car. Mutter it in your sleep. Seriously. Indie books depend on word of mouth, and all my friends are so good at running theirs that I cannot help but ask. Even taking an Instagram picture of yourself reading the book would mean a lot to me. Anyone I know who does this is invited to my house for dinner or cocktails or conversation or all three. This is what will help my book succeed, and if you’re a part of that, believe me when I say I will never forget it.

I wrote and published my first novel. I can’t believe this is my life.

DAYUNCE

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*I don’t care if you are one of the people who think trigger warnings are unnecessary or dumb, frankly. I know people who don’t want to be blindsided, and it’s my book. No one compelled me to post them, it was a choice.

**If I have forgotten to thank you (and I know there’s someone) please pelt me with rotten fruit at your earliest convenience.

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I applied to speak at commencement about two weeks before the due date. I didn’t think I had any kind of a chance to win, but I tried really hard to avoid repeating anything I’ve said in my columns at the Daily Cal. Just in case there’s someone out there taking notes.

Yes, the world is my oyster. Can we get drunk yet?

I know that most of the time, commencement speeches are dull, repetitive collections of platitudes. I tried to avoid all of that, and say something different. I reached back to the day my best friend Diane Gray spoke at her high school graduation. I remembered that she said something true and incisive, and people talked about it afterwards. I wanted the same for my speech. And I got it.

.@ killin though.��
Nam Le (@AGuyNamedNam)

What follows is what I wanted to say, exactly and without any addendum or editing by the administration. I caught a few rapt faces in the audience, and wonderful feedback afterward including a woman who asked when my first book would be out. I told her with no small satisfaction that it debuts this summer.

Congratulations to all my fellow graduates. It was a pretty damned good day. Transcipt follows, since there was no sign interpreter at the event:

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Since the day I got accepted to Berkeley, I’ve been saying goodbye. I knew from my first campus visit, while I was still waiting to be accepted, that this was too good to last very long. I came as a transfer student from Mt. San Jacinto College in a town you’ve never heard of in California’s Inland Empire. I drove up here over a weekend, still wearing my work clothes and sleeping in the car. I knew I would only get two years here, but I was determined to get more out of those two years than most people do in four. So when I said hello, I kept goodbye in mind.

I got here because of my family and my tribe working long hours in retail jobs so that we could do better than our parents did. Working retail is like panning for gold. It has its moments, but most of it is false hope and exhaustion and dirt. My life is now neatly divided into periods: before Berkeley and after Berkeley. Before Berkeley, I was a high school dropout with many dreams but few plans. After Berkeley, my dreams happen in bullet points and everything looks a lot closer.

Dreaming is easy. Talent is a gift. I had to learn how to work and how to work the system in order to make anything come together. I spent my teenage years waiting for something to happen and I wasn’t the only one.

My best friend graduated from high school a year or two before I dropped out. She spoke at her graduation, just like I’m doing now. She spoke to a crowd that had yet to experience 9/11 or the wars that followed, who had only begun to use the internet, and she admitted that our generation didn’t know what our challenge would look like, but that it didn’t matter because we weren’t ready for it anyway. She was right.

We walked out of the auditorium that day, joking that she had tempted fate—basically giving the universe the finger and taunting it for a real challenge. The universe answered.

When the universe came back with a challenge, I had to go back to school. I didn’t know enough to know how to fix it, or even who I was. Coming to Cal meant finding pieces of me I didn’t know would be here. I knew I was a writer, but I had no concept of the canon of those who went before me until the best English teachers in the world taught me Chaucer, Milton, and Shakespeare. I had no idea about the evolving canon until those same teachers introduced me to Toni Morrison, Djuna Barnes, and Maxine Hong-Kingston. I had no exposure for my own work until I started writing for Caliber Magazine. I had no discipline for the written word until I joined the world-class team that runs The Daily Californian. I am walking away today with incredible gifts, some earned but many given. I cannot thank all of you enough for helping me to become so much more than I was.

I’ve been saying goodbye since I got here, but today’s the day to say hello. After all, commencement doesn’t mean ending. It means beginning. What begins here is not the blank slate my best friend called out from the podium at her high school graduation. What begins here is a series of challenges that if overcome will make us the greatest generation yet. If you are walking across this stage with me today and you don’t feel challenged by what lays before you, I encourage you to take off your cap and gown and stay. Stay here until you see the tasks before you. I know sometimes it’s hard to wrap your head around; our future holds obstacles so large we can’t see over or around them anymore. Join the digging crew, or get with the people who are learning how to fly. I’ll see you on the other side.

I have one last thought before we commence, before we get started in our work.

We are living in the age of misattribution. Finding a quote these days means picking something that hasn’t been listed on Facebook as having been said by Martin Luther King, Marilyn Monroe, or Bob Marley, but I found this one by Holocaust survivor Dr. Viktor Frankl: “If it is to give light it must endure burning.�� We are burning in the fires of our debt and obligations. We are burning in the fires of our causes, of clean water, of human trafficking, of education and access to health and wealth and music and art. We are burning in the fires of the task before us, the challenge my friend awaited when she spoke in 1999. We are burning, we have been burning all our lives. Now is our time to give light. Fiat lux.

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Note: I did not grow up like this.

The other day I was at my desk at my internship. I love that job. (Yeah, I call it a job even though they’re not paying me. I do real and meaningful work there, and I enjoy it.) Over the cubicle wall, I overheard someone being talked through the installation of a standing desk.

“Ok, so you’re going to want to vary it up and see what feels good to you. Maybe an hour up, an hour down? Or like half hour up, half hour down. Whatever works for you. If you find that when you stand, you’re getting foot pain or lower back pain, we can get you a rubber relief mat.��

“What’s that?��

I was transported to another time, another place. I was picking up rubber relief mats in a kitchen covered in chicken grease to take them out back and hose them down. I was sweeping rubber mats clean at the end of the night, cursing their texture, exhausted. I was scuffing my shoes at the toe and the heel, standing on the outsides of my feet, trying to at least make the endless throb change places or tone in the bones of my feet.

This. This shit right here. Like a glass of lukewarm water in hell.

“What’s a rubber relief mat?��

A rubber relief mat is the difference between standing on concrete for 8-18 hours a day, or standing on rubber. It’s not much, but the oldtimers told me it made the difference between an Epsom soak every couple of days and surgery down the road.

At my internship and at Cal, I’m surrounded by people who’ve never had to stand all day performing a repetitive task for a pittance. Office jobs come with some undreamed-of perks for those of us coming from food service/hospitality/retail. Let me share with you some of the best things about this job.

1. I have a chair. I read this ��not too long ago about a guy who went through this in reverse�� from a good desk job to the grinding indignity and exhaustion of retail. His first note was that you don’t sit. That was my experience as well. In previous jobs, sitting was often an invitation to a dressing-down, or formal discipline. At the internship where people don’t even know what relief mats are for, I sit.

2. I can go to the ladies room anytime I like. It’s a small, basic privilege, but I’ve been in jobs where I’ve lacked it. Responsible for a cash register or an exit, I’ve had to wait to be relieved. I’ve done the dance and I’ve bled through my pants waiting.

This is a dramatization. I am not actually a blonde.

3. I can have a cup of tea or something to eat at my desk. Aside from a bottle of water, this is a serious no-no in most customer-facing retail jobs. It seems an incredible luxury not to have to hide a cup of coffee under my desk.

4. On the subject of what’s on my desk, I’d like to add my phone, my personal effects, and books that I’m carrying. Because it’s still novel to me that I don’t have to lock these up somewhere far away from me for the duration of my shift.

5. I don’t punch in, I don’t punch out. There’s a reasonable expectation of coming and going on time, but no one menaces me or writes me up over minutes lost the way they did in retail.

6. I’m not searched on my way out the door. Yes, that’s a real thing. Yes, it’s legal.

7. My boss gets frustrated and says “Fuck�� when she feels like it. We don’t pretend like we’re a bunch of kids hiding from the adult managers with our naughty words. Swearing judiciously in the comfort of your own cubicle is the embodiment of white-collar privilege. Blue-collar workers swear under their breath, and seethe.

Look at the veins in her neck. Srsly.

is in this country. It’s even more unlikely in situations like mine. I was born poor and lived in poverty most of my life. Remember that day that Fox said you weren’t poor if you had a refrigerator? Well ha ha, you heartless miserly bastards. The year I spent fishing wet hot dogs out of a styrofoam cooler is my street cred. We were lights-off, stealing water from the neighbor’s spigot in the night, food stamp poor. Because of that, my first jobs were in food service, hospitality, and retail sales. By the time I had climbed up the ladder to retail sales (Lowe’s, Home Depot) I was incredibly grateful because they offered unthinkable benefits like a 401k plan and health insurance. (I could never afford that health insurance, but hey. It was there.)

Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?

Going to college is hard. It’s hard to figure out, if no one shows you how. It’s hard to wangle your way through financial aid, to put together deposit and first and last for a new apartment. It’s hard to buy a car when you’ve never done anything but pay cash for something that was already on its last good cylinder. This is all pretty obvious, right?

What nobody tells you is how hard it is to adjust to the culture. How to figure out what to wear to the office. How to tell your boss you’re going to go get lunch without sounding like you’re asking the warden for permission to leave the chain gang to piss. How to conceal your amazement at the water cooler, the coffee machine, the absence of anybody micromanaging your time for no other reason than to prove to you that you are not in charge here. How to conceal your amusement when someone has to explain that a rubber mat might make the choice to stand sometimes easier on your body.

I know it sounds insane, but the real class war is invisible. It’s the way these habits and expectations add up, they way they bend your spine and teach you to avoid eye contact. Diane di Prima said the only war is the war for the imagination. It’s so true that it’s scary. Remember those ��that showed how improving your posture changed an individual’s attitude and increased their chances of success? That’s my life. I’m pretending I belong, doing as the Romans do, and it’s working.*

When I heard my boss discussing the ergonomics of her work space, I remembered the life I used to have. But I stayed in my chair, in the life I have now, and I smiled. I drank my tea. I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

I’m new to this economic class, but I can only assume this is where things are headed.

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*I fully acknowledge that this works in part because of my unearned privilege, and I recognize that what’s working for me will not work for everyone.

I love speculative fiction.

In “Misery,�� Stephen King does a lot more than the film��version of the story offers. The movie is a great depiction of how scary unchecked mental illness, obsession, and stalking can become. The book has all that�� but it also has the musings of a writer under bizarre circumstances figuring out what the bare bones of his craft are. In those jumbled thoughts, author Paul Sheldon remembers a game called Can You? Can you rescue your hero? Can you tell Wizard of Oz from the perspective of the scarecrow? Can you make an old story new again?

I love speculative fiction, because it’s what happens when we play Can You?. This collection plays that game with myths and legends from Asia and all over the Pacific. Some of the stories I knew before I received my advance reader’s copy, others sent me flailing toward Wikipedia. All of them were more fun than what I should be reading on my bus ride home. So let’s dive in!

These stories were so varied and so far beyond what I was expecting, it would be impossible to generalize, or to respond to every story in the collection. So, what follows are my favorites.

“Operation Toba 2049�� by Kris Williamson, Malaysia

Call me morbid, but I love this kind of speculation on how people and governments will deal with ecological disaster. Partly because I fear it will really happen, and partly because of what we all reveal in how we speak to that fear. This story is short, but very emotional. It examines the immediate consequences of the interruption of water and sanitation services in the context of a distressed family. Tat family becomes very real very quickly, and I found myself fighting their thirst, their stench of garbage.

“Target: Heart�� by Recle Etino Vibal, Philippines

You know what’s ripe for speculation? Love and coupling. We are always finding new ways to work it out or change it up. Add immortality and the possibilities are endless. This author’s sense of dialogue is unerring and immediately draws the reader in.

“The Volunteer�� by T.R. Napper, Thailand/Vietnam

This might have been the longest story in the anthology, but it was utterly fascinating. The experience of conscription, the complicated nature of dual identity and alliances, and the way that small decisions can alter the course of one’s life keep this one very interested. Napper has worked in international aid, and it shows. The rendering of translations is done skillfully, in a way that neither masks nor over-emphasizes the idea that people are speaking other languages. If you’re looking for action, this story may be your favorite.

“No Name Islands,�� by Kawika Guillermo, Indonesia

I think this story was the most visceral for me, despite how short it is. Here, too, we are in a speculative world of what might be with regard to ecology, this time with terraforming. The final image in this story will haunt me for a long time.

“Yamada’s Armada�� by Eeleen Lee, Singapore

This was one story where I knew some things, like the helix bridge. This was also a story where I didn’t know some things, like that there is a Mid-Autumn Festival in many parts of the world. “Yamada’s Armada�� struck me as a dark iteration on the Willy Wonka theme, while at the same time being wonderfully inventive.

“Lola’s Lessons�� by Shenoa Carroll-Bradd, Philippines

It’s hard to say anything about why this one is so good without giving it away. I’ll just say that it reminds me of some of the best ghost stories I’ve ever heard.

Last but not least, my friend Jo Wu is featured in this anthology. Her piece is called “Moon Rabbit,�� and the story comes from China.

Jo is a wonderful writer. I’d never heard any of the Moon Rabbit stories before, so I have to thank her for getting me to read about them online. Her version is a twisted retelling, thick with the greed and cruelty that makes up the worst in men. The tone of the story reminds me of classic fairy tales, and I couldn’t help picturing the rabbit-girl protagonist as the star of her very own anime film. If you know the story of Yue Tu, you ��will love where this goes. If you don’t know it, Jo will help bring you up to speed before the adventure begins.

The publisher of this anthology, Solarwyrm, has a crowdfunding project up right now. Making a contribution could net you some sweet ebooks if you’re interested. The campaign is here:��

Overall: if you’re like me and you love the game of Can You?, you will enjoy this collection of stories very much. Also, if like me you’re the kind of adult who still requires a story or two at bedtime, these will do nicely. If you’re a reader of Asian-American fiction or Hyphen magazine, you might be looking for just this kind of book. But really, if you love to read as much as I do, any excuse will do.

Bubble tea, thrill of my afternoon, cooling of my tongue. My mouth, my mind. Bub-ble-tea: the bounce and blow of my lips taking a trip to the tilt of my tongue back to tap at the teeth on three. Bub. Bull. Tee.

It was boba, exotic boba, the first time, standing at a curious kiosk in the afternoon sun with misspelled words in its sign. It was milk tea in a tall cup with cartoon plastic film on top. It was taro tea on the dotted line when I swiped my card. But in my mouth, it is always bubbly bubble tea.

Did it have a precursor? In point of fact, it did. There might not have been a bubble tea at all if I had not loved and then lost, one summer, a certain satisfactory Jamba Juice. On a street with a view of the sea. Oh when was that? About an hour longer than it should have been between me and my breakfast. You can always count on a writer to ignore hunger until it becomes a panic and then choose poorly when the time comes.

Ladies and gentlemen of Yelp, exhibit one is what the misinformed people assume is a smoothie. Those noble passerby, the uninitiated who seize not upon the glory; the sip and the suck, the syrupy swallow in this silken slurpee, and I the slurper. They know not that they should envy what pleasure is mine alone.

Look at this pile of receipts.

The man came to the door. I hadn’t been out of bed yet, but I was awake. When I heard the bell, I lit the lamp and got dressed. He rang again and I stumped to the door.

The sunlight was blinding. Too much wine. I couldn’t see his face, just the bill of his cap. He pushed the clipboard at me and said how I had to sign for something or other. I signed.

The package was small and it could have been anything inside. I didn’t remember what I had ordered. It was too early. I handed him back his clipboard and he looked down at my leg.

“Say, how did you hurt your leg?��

We were done but he wouldn’t leave. I looked at this face with the blinding light behind it.

“In the war.��

“Oh. Thank you for your service, sir.��

I didn’t answer. I didn’t care. I wanted a bath. I wanted him to go away so I could open the box and then take a bath in deep water.

I looked at him. He went away and I shut the door.

In the kitchen, I ripped the box open. Inside, a series of plastic bags full of air. Underneath them, a white packing slip. The paper said two sets of whiskey stones. I pulled the sheet out and looked into the box. There was one set in there.

“What the hell, Amazon,�� I said. “What the hell.��

I threw the handful of stones into the freezer. It is very important to learn to handle disappointment gracefully. I would send an email to their complaint department. I should have refused the package. Known it by weight. Anyway, I went to my bar and made a whiskey and soda. Drank it warm. Thought of the package man and his blinding face.

I got into the bath and turned on the water. The water was hot and good.

“No one should be alone in the bath without a cold whiskey,�� I thought.

I listened underwater. I heard the faucet dripping and nothing else.