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Bewildering Stories

Challenge 976

Family Jokes

  1. In David A. Riley’s Lucilla, part 10: Miranda realizes that she has transmitted a kind of telepathic, telekinetic parasite from Lucilla to Daisy. At what point did the readers learn that this invader could not control Miranda?

  2. In David Santiago’s The Saboteur: Ofelia wakens in a hotel room she has not reserved. Aside from the unidentifiable yellow stain, the strange dog and the missing lecture notes, how would you expect Ofelia to react? What would your immediate reaction be if you knew you could not recall being kidnapped and abandoned in a swanky hotel?

  3. In Laramie Wyatt Sanchez Graber’s We’re a Family Company: How, exactly, does Fresh Foods, Inc. brainwash its employees into mindless subservience? Drugs? Propaganda? Hypnotism? Something else?

  4. In Evelyn Puerto’s Green Cheese and Stardust: Why does Emma come to her great-aunt Linda’s home while knowing almost nothing about her? Does Linda serve as a standing practical joke in the famiy?

  5. Katherine Sanger, How to Feed Your Family After the Apocalypse: How might the story serve as a small handbook to writing post-apocalypse fiction? What makes the story a story rather than an essay?

  6. In Michael Murry’s The Forms Must Be Obeyed:

    1. Is it practical even to consider composing a pantoum by proceeding from one line to the next? How might the process of composition be organized on a spreadsheet?

    2. Does the poet’s critique of the genre’s limitations extend beyond English? Charles Baudelaire’s Harmonie du soir (Evening Harmony), in his collection Les Fleurs du mal, combines the sheer music of the words with the form of the pantoum to make a verbal valse mélancolique (melancholy waltz).

    Responses welcome!

    date Copyright © November 28, 2022 by Bewildering Stories
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