A Magazine of Many Arts

Waiting by Pat Lillich

Welcome to the initial issue of Polu Texni. In this issue, we have artwork by Pat Lillich, fiction by Jack Skillingstead and the first part of a story by Adam Rurik, and interviews with Pat and Jack. Next issue, on September 29th, we’ll have a new story by Michael A. Burstein, the second part of Adam’s story, and an article on the art of costuming.

You might be surprised to see these pieces described as dolls. Maybe you think figurative art is a better description. But I hope you like her work as much as I do. Click on the thumbnails to see larger versions of the pictures, and read on below to learn more about this artist.

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Adam Rurik is a Canadian author and serial procrastinator with a fascination for the dark side of human nature, as he shows in this story. When I first read this story, I felt guilty that I liked it. But, er, like it I did. Maybe this means I’m a bad person.

You’re not going to have a heart attack, you’re not gonna have a stroke, you’re not gonna have a heart attack, you’re not g—

Bang! The bus hits a pothole which is, if the force of the jolt is any indication, roughly the size of Meteor Crater in Arizona. My mantra is cut off in mid-though, and this plus the adrenal rush from the unexpected, badly-absorbed shock/noise of our encounter with the pothole raises my heart rate to about ten thousand beats per minute from its previous leisurely pace of around 7,500. I’m already having my worst anxiety attack in three months, and the little Demon inside my head is carrying me off toward full-blown panic much faster than this damn bus is carrying me home.

You’re not gonna have a heart attack, you’re not gonna have —

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Jack is an author living in the Pacific Northwest who has appeared in Asimov’s, Realms of Fantasy, and numerous Year’s Best Anthologies. Read more about him in the profile, following.

Cab Macarron left his patrol car at the state barracks but he didn’t bother to change out of his trooper’s uniform. He picked up Joe Rodriguez at the Penny Diner in Goldbar and they headed straight to the Soams place as dusk was descending on the North Cascades. If there was going to be trouble Cab wanted backup. He had played football with Joe in high school. Back then, only five years ago, they had called Rodriguez “The Monster.” He was still a big son of a bitch. Cab and Joe had always stuck together, pulling a three year hitch in the Marines and then going for troopers.

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I first “met” Jack while working on my previous publishing project. We wanted to buy this story, “Double Occupancy”, for that project, but in the end that project never happened. It would have been Jack’s first published story. When I started this site, I thought of it again and wondered what Jack was up to. I was thrilled to discover how well his career had gone in the last ten years. He’s had stories published in Asimovs and stories chosen for the Year’s Best Anthology. It made me feel smart to have recognized his talent ten years ago.

1) Tell me about your first published story, since I missed that opportunity.

I wrote “Dead Worlds” in late 2001 and Gardner Dozois bought it for Asimov’s in August of 2002. It appeared in the June 2003 issue, made the Sturgeon Award short list and was reprinted in Dozois’ “Year’s Best Science Fiction, Twenty-First Edition.” Certainly not what I expected when I sat down to rehash an idea I’d originally tried out many years earlier and presented to a college writing class, to less than enthusiastic response from my instructor, a minor poet and occasional short story writer whose claim to fame at that point had been the sale of an erotic poem to Playboy Magazine. The truth is, by the year 2000 I’d given up hope of ever seeing my work published. After years of trying, and easily more than a million words written, I was out of gas. This would have been a good time to pack it in and get on with more mundane matters. But to my dismay I discovered that I couldn’t surrender my obsession. So after a suitable period of head-banging despair and heavy drinking, I resumed my usual routine of short story writing. Giving up on “success” turned out to be a great career move. Liberated from the annoying distraction of tying to please remote editors and satisfy baffling markets, I wrote whatever the hell I felt like writing and almost immediately made acquaintance with the approval I’d courted fruitlessly for years. Actually, I’d always written pretty much what I felt like writing. It’s just that no one was interested in it. About the time I sold you “Double Occupancy” I thought I was on a roll, that I’d made a major breakthrough and was writing the first decent stories of my life. But though I came close with a number of them at markets such as Weird Tales and Deathrealm and MZB’s Fantasy Magazine, I just could NOT crack the bubble. And of course, even “Double Occupancy”– technically my first sale –never made it into print until now. There’s probably a lesson in all this about perseverance and dogged determination, but really I’m just a prisoner of my obsessions.
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I first met Pat Lillich back in 1996 on an email list (dollmakers@dollmaking.org). She told a story about how she reacted to a painful time in her life by wanting to make a baby doll. She felt that she had made a beautiful doll in her characteristic all white look, but when she exhibited it at an art show people berated her for showing a sculpture of a dead baby. I didn’t see the doll, but for some reason I could picture it perfectly and the image stayed in my head. I could imagine a sleeping ethereal face that made some observers recoil.

I didn’t hear from Pat for years. Years later, I mentioned her story of the dead baby on the list and wondered what happened to her. To my surprise, she answered me. She had been lurking all along. This time, I had the opportunity to see her artwork, and my expectations were blown away. Typically, her pieces are otherworldly and pure white, with maybe a splash of color. Even the ones that aren’t obviously fantasy seem to have come from another world.

Recently, her work has received acclaim from many sources. She was profiled on Endicott Studio, and she was voted into NIADA, one of the highest honors in the dollmaking world.

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Look for the first issue September 15th with fiction by Jack Skillingstead and Adam Rurik, and an artists’s profile on Pat Lillich.