New Issue Teaser #1

Hello 9L readers! Copies of the brand new issue are making their way through the the mail to subscribers right now. We're very proud of it, so we hope you enjoy it. For non-subscribers, we're working on getting our webstore up and running again and hope to have it available for you in the near future.

However, we can't wait to share it with you, so we'll be offering some teasers from the new issue. First up, is some fiction by Angela Woodward, Excerpts from The End of the Fire Cult.

Three years ago my husband gave me two-thirds of an exceptionally beautiful and sacred mountain. I disputed whether he owned it in the first place, but I accepted through treaty his offer of the majority portion. The mountain lay on the northern border of a country I had intricately imagined a year earlier. I visualized it first as a topographical map, hillocks and indentations mostly shrouded in mist. But gradually it became clearer to me, and I filled it with barley fields and tin mines, forests, a few largish towns, and many pleasant hamlets. I gave it a capital city, a system of decaying highways, a library, a river port. I considered placing a benign queen in charge, but then named it the Free Republic of Marmoral, and put it under the auspices of a hereditary oligarchy of thieves. I people the towns with several tribes of conflicting religions and a useful urban poor. The countryside remained quiet and green, more of a mystery. I used to tell my husband about it, back when we leaned against each other in the evenings, and sometimes he would ask if he could add a little bit - a touristy waterfall, a rare species of hummingbird. "I don't think that's quite right," I said.

Be sure to check out Ninth Letter, vol. 7, no. 1, to read more. Also, The End of the Fire Cult will be released by Ravenna Press in October.