Welcome To The Raven’s Quill
Welcome to the Raven’s Quill, official blog of Stone Raven Press! We plan to use this forum to help readers and writers get to know the press a little better, and to share news about our publications, submissions, and the world of speculative fiction in general.
For our first post, we thought we’d let the staff share some thoughts about a writerly icebreaker topic – "If you could choose any place in the worlds of speculative fiction to live, where would you choose and why?" As you can see, we’re all fans as well as publishing types. You can find more biographical info here.
Larissa N.N. Davila (Publisher)
Given the secret to get there, I would transport myself to Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Avalon. Avalon, with the mists silvering summer mornings and the scent of apples flavoring the air. Bradley’s Mists of Avalon was the first work of fantasy I read that had a medieval setting—an Arthurian setting, no less—in which women could win a level of agency within the halls of leadership and over their own lives. Bradley depicted female characters with subtlety and moral complexity. I was in my early teens when I read it, and it changed the way I thought about fantasy literature. I realized suddenly that a woman in genre fiction could impact her world and did not have to be just another holy grail, another vessel for men to seek out and place on an altar. Avalon wouldn’t be a peaceful or an easy place to live, but it would be a setting where a woman could access her own strength and live in accord with the rhythms of the natural world, and that, in any reality, seems worth the struggle.
Geoffrey McVey (Editor)
The world I would like to live in is that of Emma Bull's War For the Oaks. Well, I wouldn't opt for Minneapolis, but I have to assume the clash between faerie courts isn't a local one in that version of our world. Why? Because it promised, for one of the first times, that there is more to our lives than what we see. That there is a hidden reality we can sometimes reach if we are lucky enough, attentive enough, open enough to wonder. It's a story that not only affected how I imagined what fantasy could be, but how to look at the world around me. It turned it into a place of quiet poetry, beauty, and awe; what more could a writer want?
The first setting that really hit me in the feels was the Murray house in A Wrinkle in Time. Meg’s cozy attic bedroom with its homemade quilts and books and brass bed, the cheerful chaos of the kitchen, the windy New England small-town vibe – they were all so appealing to me, and spoke of magical and literary possibilities that weren’t present in my ordinary, treeless, too-hot suburban Texas neighborhood. Mrs. Murray had a lab next to the kitchen! Dogs and kittens ran around the place at will! Weird old ladies who were actually stars lived next door! Meg’s world was both old-fashioned and science-fictiony, eerie and familiar, childlike and adult. I’ve never been drawn to the sterile, shiny surfaces of futuristic settings, and rocket ships make me claustrophobic. I longed for a reality in which we could have our nice Victorian houses but also travel to the stars instantly, without all that chrome and nuclear fuel and photon torpedoes. Madeleine L’Engle wrote science fiction for domestic cocooners like me, and Meg’s room will always be a sanctuary in my imagination.
Hannah Gordon (Marketing and Publicity)
I have longed for so many literary places. But perhaps the most prominent in my heart is Fiddler's Green, a sentient part of the Dreaming in the Sandman series by Neil Gaiman. We first meet Fiddler’s Green as Gilbert, a kindly older gentleman with a badass streak, and later realize he is so much more: he is part of the Dreaming that all travelers wish to find someday. Even as Gilbert, Fiddler’s Green would be lovely company to sip tea with and chat about everything and nothing all at once. But as a place, Fiddler’s Green is a lush paradise: waterfalls, meadows, everything my nature-loving pagan heart could desire. The perfect place to read—and write—books. A place to have adventures (as well as afternoon naps). A place where the weather is always perfect and the air is always peaceful.