At the Intersection of Fantasy and Belief

I’ve been a playwright, a biblical scholar and a speculative fiction author, in overlapping phases. Being a theater professional or a religion professor didn’t work out, and I don’t anticipate retiring with my millions from bestselling fiction. Nonetheless, I’ve left some trail markers behind me.
My first book is titled (rather drily) Jewish Ethnic Identity and Relations in Hellenistic Egypt: With Walls of Iron. In it I argue against the common assumption that Jewish people in Egypt 2000 years ago had nothing to do with the Egyptian people among whom they lived, and vice versa. Jewish and Egyptian folks met and talked everyday. Mostly it went well. Sometimes it didn’t. But Jewish and Egyptian identities were strong enough to anchor these conversations without either side being absorbed into the other. It’s a situation that is still relevant today. I got lucky and published it before I finally had to leave academia for lack of a job. I’m darn proud of it. Here it is, if you have a couple hundred to spare: https://brill.com/display/title/32179

But as I say, being a professor didn’t work out. Without the time and resources to write scholarly work, I went back to my first love: fiction, specifically fantasy, science fiction and horror. I don’t know what it is, but I need that unreal element. Naturalism just doesn’t do it for me. There’s probably a reason. Maybe we’ll even figure it out. My first professionally published story was about a woman with a lion’s tail, and an old man who remembered her–or someone like her–from way back when. It’s called “One Thin Dime.” Really, it’s a love letter to Ray Bradbury: https://www.amazon.com/Beastly-Bride-Tales-Animal-People/dp/0670011452. It went over well enough that Paula Guran reprinted it in a collection Halloween stories–that even had a Bradbury story in it (!): https://www.amazon.com/Halloween-Paula-Guran/dp/1607012839

My second published story appeared in 2018, but I wrote the first draft in the late 1990s. In it, a fisherman asks his local priest whether a man can marry a mermaid. The story is that priest’s journey to “Yes,” and it’s called “The Apostle to the Sea.” It was published by Mysterion, a lovely e-zine dedicated to the confluence of fantasy and Christianity: https://www.mysteriononline.com/2018/09/the-apostle-to-sea.html

My third short story was published in 2019 in Diabolical Plots. In “Lies of the Desert Fathers,” a neurosurgeon tries to cure psychopaths with magnetic cranial implants. To better help their reclamation, she organizes them into a monastery. As in any version of the Frankenstein archetype, things go sideways quickly: https://www.diabolicalplots.com/tag/stewart-moore/

Next came my first podcast presentation in the aptly named PseudoPod. In “The Aetherised Chamber,” a contemporary of Isaac Newton tries to outdo the great scientist by constructing a machine that can hear the voice of God. What he finally hears, unfortunately, comes from someone very different: https://pseudopod.org/2020/02/21/pseudopod-690-the-aetherised-chamber/

Another story with old roots, this one all the way back to college, “Madeline’s Wings” was published in the small press magazine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Madeline makes wings: angel wings, demon wings, eagle wings. When an old man asks for dragon’s wings–because he is a dragon–she must decide whether he’s sane enough to take on the job, or if she’d have his death on her conscience: https://smallbeerpress.com/lcrw/2020/08/28/lady-churchills-rosebud-wristlet-no-42/

My most recent publication came in the collection O+EU (“Orpheus and Eurydice Unbound”), a collection of riffs on the old myth. My story, “Emily Stands at the Spartan Gates,” closes the anthology with the more recent repercussions of the events in mythic time: http://aanpress.com/aanorder.html#oeu

I have a bunch of stories out for submission now, and if any of them make the grade, I’ll let you know here. Thanks for reading!