The Compassionate Fairy Punks of Quail Bell

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coverQuail Bell Magazine recently named FLAPPERHOUSE as a “Featured Zine.”  To be completely honest, we were not familiar with Quail Bell before they featured us, but we were extremely flattered by their honor, and, once we got a chance to click around their website, we were also very impressed by what they do. You might even say we feel like our two publications are kindred spirits, sisters from different misters. As Exhibit A, we offer Quail Bell‘s Mission Statement:

Quail Bell Magazine is a place for real and unreal stories. Our readers are curious, creative, and compassionate fairy punks who are citizens of the world. All members of The Quail Bell Crew respect and embrace all cultures, excluding only the sexist, racist, homophobic, and otherwise unkind and uncompromising. It is because of this open-mindedness and positivity that Quail Bell Magazine is fortunate enough to publish content by contributors from across the globe. Quail Bell Magazine encourages original thought, open dialogue and community-building through content that explores the relationship between The Real and The Unreal. We value the arts, history, folklore, and other oddities often not mentioned in mainstream magazines. As a woman-run publication, we strive to publish only the highest-quality content that not only challenges readers, but lets them have a little fun and maybe enjoy a little cuteness, too. We are not attempting to produce a magazine that is purely literary or purely journalistic, but, rather, somewhere in between for results that are inspiring and informative. In all that we write, draw, photograph, and otherwise make, The Quail Bell Crew will honor this editorial mission statement.

Continue reading The Compassionate Fairy Punks of Quail Bell →

FLAPPERHOUSE Reading #1

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A surreal, shadowy, sensual, satirical evening you won’t soon forget. A very flappy time will be had by all who attend.FLAPPERHOUSE Reading Flyer

Outside the Flapperhouse – 7.29.2014

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Our beloved Flappers have been popping up all over the internet these past few weeks:

Julie C. Day‘s bewitching flash fiction “Drinking Grandma’s Tea” was published by Bartleby Snopes. 

Mila Jaroniec shared “5 Unpopular Opinions in No Particular Order” with Thought Catalog.

FLAPPERHOUSE #3 contributor Brendan Byrne’s article “Urban Growth: Bio-Bricks Offer a Whiff of the Future” was posted by New Scientist.

Diana Clarke, another contributor to our Fall 2014 issue, talked robotics and erotics in her interview with a virologist at The Toast.

Future contributor Dusty Wallace’s poem “DNR” appeared at The Mystic Nebula.

J. Bradley interviewed David James Poissant, author of The Heaven of Animals, at Electric Literature.

J.E. Reich‘s novel The Demon Room is now available as an audiobook through Audible.com.

Rebecca Ann Jordan busted some character cliches at DIYMFA.

“Lunch” – Poetry by Jeff Laughlin

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Christ Feeding the Multitude - Artist & Date Unknown
Christ Feeding the Multitude – Artist & Date Unknown

In our Summer 2014 issue (currently available in PDF form for $3 US), our old friend Jeff Laughlin has two viciously funny and deeply incisive poems about poverty & other job-related miseries, excerpted from his fantastic new collection Life and Debt. We’re very flappy to present one of those poems, “Lunch,” below.

{ X }

OH WHAT WONDROUS STORIES AWAIT THE MASSES–
oh counterculture, lie down next to each of us
band us together under avarice-torn skies
as we rip to shreds our love of the moment.

This sandwich belies the true ideas of the gods!
Tuna fish! Tuna fish! I hearken to the days when
only seven of you would have fed 5,000 of us.
Now I am still hungry after devouring you whole.

Do you remember when we got an hour? I gave
lunch up for overtime long ago—when the air
was still clean and soda cost fifty cents and oh
when the myth of raises weren’t so horribly stale.

When the old guard still worked here, we drank
all day and cavorted with women all night, but
some of them died and others disappeared, say,
have you heard from them? I miss their candor.

They would never have taken these benefit cuts.
No, they would have painted their faces and boldly
attacked with blind rage! No matters of money or
heart can destroy the will of those ineffable beasts!

Send us the treasonous, venomous lying horde of
office-workers! We’ll crush them, hands wrenching
raw neckbone, blood streaming down our arms, but
I need a ride to the bank first, please, I have overdrawn.

{ X }

JarffJEFF  LAUGHLIN writes about the Bobcats Hornets for Creative Loafing Charlotte & about sports in general for Triad City Beat in Greensboro, NC. His 1st book of poetry, Drinking with British Architects, is riddled with mistakes but available free if you want it. His 2nd book is Alcoholics Are Sick People, and If you ask nicely, he’ll probably give that to you too. Contact Jeff on his seldom-used twitter (@beardsinc) or email him (repetitionisfailure @gmail.com). He likely needs a haircut.

FLAPPERHOUSE #1 Silent Auction

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The very first paper copy of FLAPPERHOUSE #1 is now for sale in a silent auction!

Email your bid to FLAPPERHOUSE at gmail dot com. Highest bidder as of the stroke of midnight on August 1, 2014, will be mailed this historic piece of Flappricana.

“Other Side of the Fence” – Fiction by Anna Tizard

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Chat au Clair de Lune - Theophile-Alexandre Steinlen, circa 1900
Chat au Clair de Lune – Theophile-Alexandre Steinlen, circa 1900

 Anna Tizard‘s “Other Side of the Fence,” from our Summer 2014 issue, shows us the world through the eyes of a feline figure with a curious past who traverses the boundaries between the mundane and the magically macabre.

{ X }

“I SWEAR IT WAS ONE OF ‘EM, I SWEAR.”

“Nick. It’s a misty night. Come on.”

“Nah, nah – it was her mist. I saw it rise. She’s a shape-shifter, I’m telling you.”

“Yeah. Just like that frog the other night from the pond at number six. Right idiot you made of us, getting caught in that hedge! I’m still picking thorns out of my sweater…”

The voices faded, muffled by the mist as I eased through a gap in the fence and shuddered the woody grit off my fur. Fences: most human folk just see barriers, separating devices. Opportunities, gaps, hidden places, perhaps a high viewing post; these are the fences held in the eyes of cats, immortals, and perhaps those two chasers back there, human by the look of it, their eyes widened by a preternatural curiosity.

If there was still a trace of my own mist clinging to my back legs, I wouldn’t have known it. I was too distracted by the sponginess of the grass beneath my paws, the newness of it all. The lowness of the twilight sky, a blanket of slate-grey with just a glimmer of blue and pink in it, swallowing everything into itself. To sniff the air was to have those colours wash through me, the scent of rain one and the same thing as my anticipation, and that first pinch of hunger.

At the tremor of those clumsy footsteps behind me I scattered up a tree, startled by my own agility, until those booming voices moved off, still bickering. For the first few hours of my life as a cat I didn’t test out my new dexterity but sat tensed as a watchman over those rows of rectangular gardens as the shadows unfolded themselves like some ancient leather-bound book falling open over everything.

This is the way I have learned to remember it, running a claw over the past. At the time I didn’t have enough experience of old books, blankets, or even humans to see it quite that way. But age and experience can help you piece together what was violent, fragmented, nothing more than imprints in the mud quickly filling up with rainwater.

What little I did know at that time spun back to me soon enough, though, shivering the very dew off my back as I dug my nerves deep into the branch beneath me.

Continue reading “Other Side of the Fence” – Fiction by Anna Tizard →

Outside the Flapperhouse – 7.9.2014

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Some places around the internet where our Flappers have been flapping as of late:

In episode 4 of Scared Yet?, Kris Straub praised the polish, restraint, and unreliable narrators in Cameron Suey‘s horror & dark fantasy stories. And in S4E03 of the NoSleep Podcast,  Jeff Clement and Derek Jensen performed a reading of Cameron’s “Dust.”

Our favorite hobo journalist Todd Pate recounted his drive from Hollywood to North Dakota in his latest post for El Jamberoo.

fwriction : review has been displaying “London, 1973,” an excerpt from J.E. Reich‘s novel-in-progress To Build A New World.

Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam has two more stories out there: “The Foster Child” at Expanded Horizons and “The Hoof Situation” at Scigentasy.

J. Bradley combined poetry with Information Mapping in “Zeke” for Plain Wrap Press.

“The Virgin” – Fiction by Dylan Jackson

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Schädel (Skull) - Vincent van Gogh, 1887/1888
Schädel (Skull) – Vincent van Gogh, 1887/1888

In a dark, clammy alley near the intersection of loneliness, ignorance, violence, and lust, there’s Dylan Jackson‘s wry yet tragic tale, “The Virgin,” one of the many flappy lits included in our Summer 2014 Issue.

{ X }

SOMEONE GOT SHOT. Or, rather, many people were shot during a single incident. Some of them died, while others, despite varied injuries, managed to survive for the time being. He didn’t know where or when the incident took place, but from the little he could glean of the broken news report coming over radio in the front of the cab, Boneface knew that somewhere, people may have been as sad as him. It didn’t matter though. People die, just as more are created or brought into the world every day.

He hated getting out. Though, if it was a matter of necessity, it was reserved as a task carried out under the veil of night. On this particular evening, Boneface had found himself in want of a woman. This would be his first. After twenty-five years of unintentionally chaste living, the decision to procure intimacy had come almost as suddenly as he was sure to upon the initial encounter.

All evening he’d been sitting alone in his apartment—as he’d done nearly every evening of his adult life—pondering what it must feel like to be touched by another human to whom he bore no direct relation. The inspiration had come from nearly three hours of scanning through the titles of pay-per-view pornos that he couldn’t bring himself to purchase. It was less a matter of finance, and more an issue of pride, as his mother, and executor, would be the one to receive the bill. He’d made that mistake before and found himself wildly aroused, only to be met with deep embarrassment and shame the following month. Tonight though, he knew which mistake to avoid, and which new mistake he would forge. Continue reading “The Virgin” – Fiction by Dylan Jackson →

Outside the Flapperhouse – 7.2.2014

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Here are some writings our beloved Flappers have posted & published around the internet in the past couple weeks:

J. Bradley responded to SCOTUS’ Hobby Lobby decision with his poem “Where the White People Are: Women’s Reproductive Rights” at The New Verse News.

Mila Jaroniec recounted her “Brief History of Blackouts” in an essay for Medium.

Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam‘s short story “Hero” appeared yesterday at Daily Science Fiction.  UPDATE: Bonnie also had a story go up at Hobart last week, the amazingly-titled “The Stink of Horses: Excerpts From The Marina Golovina Controversy By the Ballet Book Series.”

Jeff Laughlin coped with a metaphysical hangover in his Hunter S. Thompson-esque “A Night Without Peace at Bowman Gray” over at Triad City Beat.

J.E. Reich‘s “Breakers” (from our current issue) was read aloud on last week’s broadcast of Mr. Bear’s Violet Hour Saloon, and it was also reposted at Medium under the title “Teasing it Open.”

Rebecca Ann Jordan‘s magical realist tale “This Is No Garden” was recently published at Swamp Biscuits and Tea.

Tom Stephan posted the very creepy “A Summertime Tale” last week. We’re not sure if it’s a true story or not, and we’re too scared to ask him for the answer.

FLAPPERHOUSE #2 is Now on Sale!

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FLAPPERHOUSE #2 is no longer for sale– because it’s now available for free!
Just click the cover to read.

FLAPPERHOUSESummerCoverNova

including

“The Heartless Boy” – Ed Ahern
“The fallow months,” “What’s cooking” – Daniel Ari
“Faerie Medicine” – Julie Day
“San Vicente” – Robin Wyatt Dunn
“Lemon Lane” – Foust
“Boko” – John Grey
“The Virgin” – Dylan Jackson
“The Workaday World,” “Lunch” – Jeff Laughlin
“One of those women” – Aoibheann McCann
“Waning & Waiting,” “Erotics of Silence” – Lonnie Monka
“Still Shooting” – Todd Pate
“Birdy Told Me” – Frederick Pollack
“Breakers” – J.E. Reich
“The New Mother” – Judith Skillman
“Scars” – Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam
“Other Side of the Fence” – Anna Tizard
“Hypothetical Foundations of a Quantum Theory of Familial Social Physics” –
Joseph Tomaras