Exterminating Angel Press

Creative Solutions for Practical Idealists.

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Wonder Stories.

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I love what Maria Tatar, the Harvard professor of folklore and fairy tales, says about the latter: that they’re really misnamed. They should by right be called “Wonder Tales.” Because what they do is express our wonder at our inner landscape as humans, rather than our outer. Wonder Tales bring out to view what’s inside us all, which is (so it seems) an infinite amount of different ways of looking at ourselves and our world. But with some bedrock values that never change: the importance of partnering with Nature. The value of what appears to be worthless. The ability to change a life, or even a world, by taking action in the right way. The great reward of Love.

All those things. And all those things are filled with a sense of wonder, at wonder that we are here and living our own stories, which can be changed in ways we sometimes have yet to imagine.

There are a few Wonder Tales of this sort in the present issue. I’m not sure what I had in mind in naming it “This May Be The Last Time,” though I wasn’t imagining this would be the last issue…I had noted the many apocalyptic strains I keep seeing in stories that come to me, and pondering what that meant about how we’re seeing the world these days. Two stories in particular, by writers EAP always loves, were about this. As We Know It, by Erin Trampler Bell, is an active imagining of how our present world might dangerously come to an end through a well-meaning arrogance. Gulfs, by Tim Myers, murmurs how the story of our world would look to someone with a story from another.

Then there is One Wrong Step and You’ve Brought on the Last Days, by Ellen Morris Prewitt—the title says it all, I think.

And my favorite this month, from a new contributor to EAP, Psyche’s Sisters, by Ed Taylor. I’m always a sucker for pieces that take the old stories from a different point of view, and by doing that, point up the danger of a narrow reading of the world.

Wonder should expand, not narrow, especially in these days, don’t we think? Because, as Paul Simon so rightly sings, “These are the days of miracles and wonder/So don’t cry, baby, don’t cry, don’t cry.”

Okay then. I’ll look for more Wonder Tales in the FALL 2015: WE WONDER issue. Meanwhile, thanks to Robert Markland Smith this issue, for imagining Then Suddenly War Ended. And to Robin Suzanne for cooking up The Center of the Universe Omelet.

Welcome back.

 

Nuances.

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by Marissa Bell Toffoli.   Give me the ordinary, give me a full story. Someone diagram for me the moment after the moment, sentence and sentiment. Details already slip like sand through my fingers. Slide a stray wisp of hair off my face. Thank you. We forget we need to read between lines. There’s an […]

GET A RAKE: The Last Garden.

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by Debbie Naples.   rats on a roasting bin ticks on the potato beetles crawling deep within the dying dread tomato kettles chewing sheets of air tea on broken plates tiny nymph flies everywhere sticking to the tape mice run through the garden chewing bits of rope then they climb the kitchen stair and start […]

Then Suddenly War Ended.

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by Robert Markland Smith. Nobody really knew why nor how, but this is what happened.There was no election or change of the guard. There was no revolutionary leader influencing others to lay down their weapons. But here and there across the world, like an epidemic, like lightning shining from East to West, one government after […]

The Center of the Universe Omelet.

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by Robin Suzanne. Way back in my murky past, lurks a brief chapter from an impulsive life. It occurred in a very, very small town. The highway running through it only acknowledges its existence by slowing to forty-five miles per hour for the distance of not quite half a mile. There is one main crossroad […]

Pompadour.

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by Clarinda Harriss. Spray Besides Jermaine of the housekeeping staff and the desk clerks who always wish her a blessed day, the only person who spoke to Candyce at the famous university’s rec center during the whole first year of her membership is a skinny, aggressively meditative type. He is a man who works out […]

Mr. Merrick and His Uncle.

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by David D. Horowitz. I often have been told: “People don’t remember particulars they learned at school, but rather they can learn how to think.” Well, I remember some particulars, too. I recall University of Washington Professor William Dunlop telling us students in his English 274, “Introduction to Verse Writing,” about the importance of imagery […]

Gulfs.

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by Tim Myers. It was the “Odditorium” that made him halt abruptly in the middle of one of their famous entertainment boulevards, with the rising inside him of a sorrow he could no longer ignore or explain away. He worked the pun out easily, taking quiet pride in the professional application of his Institute skills—only […]

As We Know It.

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by Erin Bell. July 1 Dear Farroway, I was so pleased to receive your last letter. In fact, as I write I am listening to the music module you sent, and I’m absolutely enamored of it. What a gift for you to have given me. It is all at once beautiful, terrible, haunting. Especially poignant, […]

There’s No Place Like Home.

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I firmly believe that everyone has a home, a place where they feel they belong—and if they don’t have such a place, they should, they need one. Where I feel at home won’t be the same as where you do, nor should it. Just think how crowded if we all felt the same way! Having […]