Wyngraf #4

By Nathaniel Webb

Curl up with heartwarming fiction in the tradition of Legends & Lattes and The Hobbit. Wyngraf #4 includes ten all-new tales of magic, romance, adventure, dragons, and lots of food—including our first-ever recipe!—plus a lengthy interview with Phyllis Ann Karr, author of the 1986 cozy fantasy classic At Amberleaf Fair.

~~Contents~~
* The Gentle World: A Conversation with Phyllis Ann Karr. Phyllis and editor Nathaniel Webb discuss her career, her influences, and the challenges of publishing a cozy fantasy novel when cozy fantasy wasn't a thing. At Amberleaf Fair prefigures cozy fantasy in a number of fascinating ways—learn the surprising story of the novel's genesis!

* “The Story Collector” by J.A. Collignon. You travel the land, learning stranger’s stories but always moving on. There hasn’t been a town to convince you to settle down... yet.

* “The Three Speaking Peoples” by S. B. Kleinman. Has Jeremy told you the story of how he got his sword? No? Well—

* “Never-Ever-Ever” by Shanna Germain. For a bard, a ringing in the ear means nothing less than forced retirement. But retirement isn’t an option when a rebellion relies on your music.

* “The Stormwalker” by Aidan Redwing. A ranger’s hospitality is put to the test when a creature of legend shares his tent on a stormy night. But what does the specter really want?

* “The Search for Dragonfire Chili” by Lydia Rose Hecker. If Chef Nethra’s ever going to open her own restaurant, she’ll need a signature dish. But that means an ingredient no one else can offer...

* “The Woodworker’s Guest” by Natasha Inwood. Drazhen was the happiest man in town until he lost his family. Can a strange visitor bring hope back to his life?

* “Jam Today” by Sonia Focke. What do you sell to a man on a quest for happiness?

* “A Brief Theory of Time Compression: or Interrupting Discrete Pasts” by Erin Keating. Professor Baldric Bragg of the Time Mages’ Academy visits the past to be alone—until one day, someone follows him there.

* “A Bard Comes to Bridgemoor” by Coby Anthony Rosser. In this rollicking tale of adventure, a bard, a bowfisher, and a goblin rogue band together to strike a blow for freedom (and eat a little riverboat food).

* “The Last First Flight of the Phoenix” by Jennifer Hudak. Every year, the Phoenix makes a huge production: immolation, rebirth, celebration. Zackery the catbird is officially fed up.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wyngraf
• Release date: Oct 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215280898

Nathaniel Webb

Nathaniel Webb (aka Nat20) is an author, musician, and the editor of WYNGRAF, the magazine of cozy fantasy.His novels include the geek mystery A CONVENTIONAL MURDER, the GameLit adventure EXPEDITION: SUMMERLANDS from Level Up Publishing, and the Veil of Worlds urban fantasies from Vulpine Press. His music biography MARILLION IN THE 1980s was a bestseller for Sonicbond Publishing. He has published numerous short stories and novellas in such genres as litRPG, steampunk, cozy fantasy, mystery, and sword & sorcery.As a lead guitarist, Nathaniel toured and recorded extensively with Grammy-nominated soul singer Jana Mashonee, played on Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Beth Hart's 2010 album MY CALIFORNIA, and co-produced and played guitar on Colombian pop singer Marre's 2013 album SOMBRAS DE LUZ. His band Talking to Walls toured up and down the east coast, and their 2010 release WE WERE NOT SO TALL reached CMJ's Most Added chart.His game development credits include adventures and supplements for the tabletop RPGs SHADOW OF THE DEMON LORD and GODLESS.A graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy and Wesleyan University, where he was editor of the humor rag THE AMPERSAND, Nathaniel lives in Portland, Maine with his wife and son under a massive pile of cats. He can be found at @nat20w on Twitter, where he mostly talks about cats, writing, and obscure progressive rock.

Book preview

Wyngraf

WYNGRAF

Volume 4 - Summer 2023

J. A. COLLIGNON SONIA FOCKE SHANNA GERMAIN LYDIA ROSE HECKER JENNIFER HUDAK NATASHA INWOOD ERIN KEATING S. B. KLEINMAN AIDAN REDWING COBY ANTHONY ROSSER

Publisher

NATHANIEL WEBB

Cover Artist

JENNY MURE

www.wyngraf.com

Wyngraf copyright © 2023 Young Needles Press, individual stories copyright © 2023 by their respective authors.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Cover art by Jenny Mure.

TALES AND EPHEMERA

From the Editor

The Gentle World

A Conversation with Phyllis Ann Karr

The Story Collector

J. A. Collignon

The Three Speaking Peoples

S. B. Kleinman

Never-Ever-Ever

Shanna Germain

The Stormwalker

Aidan Redwing

The Search for Dragonfire Chili

Lydia Rose Hecker

The Woodworker’s Guest

Natasha Inwood

Jam Today

Sonia Focke

Da’s Rosehip Jam

Recipe by Sonia Focke

A Brief Theory of Time Compression: or Interrupting Discrete Pasts

Erin Keating

A Bard Comes to Bridgemoor

Coby Anthony Rosser

The Last First Flight of the Phoenix

Jennifer Hudak

FROM THE EDITOR

It’s a funny thing, buying stories.

On the one hand, there’s a vision of an ideal magazine in your head, one you’re always striving toward. On the other, you have a duty to represent the state of the genre—in this case, cozy fantasy—as it stands when each issue arrives. Tip that balance too far in either direction and you wind up with a muddle. You have to lead, but also follow.

There are days when it feels impossible. But sometimes it’s as close to effortless as making a magazine can be (ha!). The issue you hold in your hands, or view on your screen, was, I’m happy to report, one such time. Despite its slightly belated arrival date (it’s the summer issue, I promise) Wyngraf #4 fell together in a way that satisfies both my editorial quiddities and the need to show where cozy fantasy is at as of late 2023.

More than that, this issue is full to bursting with connections, making it perhaps our most thematically coherent release so far.

Starting us off are J. A. Collignon’s The Story Collector and S. B. Kleinman’s The Three Speaking Peoples, which take an abundance of pleasure in being stories about telling stories—so much so that both address you, the reader, directly. What’s more cozy than being told a tale?

Now, did I mean to buy three stories about the search for happiness? No, not really, nor did I realize until writing this that I’d set them all in a row. But when you read Natasha Inwood’s The Woodworker’s Guest, Sonia Focke’s Jam Today, and Erin Keating’s A Brief Theory of Time Compression, you’ll meet three characters seeking something missing in their lives. The protagonists couldn’t be more disparate, nor could the prose… But are the lessons they learn so different? Or do they point to some universal human truth? That’s up to you.

More intentional was the inclusion of three tales set on the road. Aidan Redwing’s The Stormwalker, Lydia Rose Hecker’s The Search for Dragonfire Chili, and cover story A Bard Comes to Bridgemoor by Coby Anthony Rosser present a rich sampling of backpack fantasy (as we call it around here). We’d hate to put out an issue lacking in adventure! After all, fun and family aren’t exclusive to home—even when the wind is raging, a thief is rifling your pack, or you’re locked in a high-stakes game of chips.

Finally, we have Never-Ever-Ever from Shanna Germain, and our closer, Jennifer Hudak’s The Last First Flight of the Phoenix. When you read these two, you’ll see why I consider them linked—and why I opened by asking whether an editor’s duty is to follow their own distinct vision or represent the genre as it stands.

In Wyngraf #3 I wanted to shine a light on the romantic strain in cozy fantasy. This time, I hope to demonstrate that escapism—as essential as it is—isn’t all cozy fiction has to offer. I’m not sure I’d call any of our stories purely escapist, but if ever we’ve gone so far as to publish something with a lesson…

Or maybe I just like bards and cute animals. Who can say?

There are, of course, other ways to slice a pie, and more ways to categorize our tales. Jam Today fits with Story Collector and Speaking Peoples, for example. Bridgemoor and Never-Ever-Ever both star bards. Which stories mention food? Which authors previously appeared in our Flash Friday series?

But this issue ran way over word count, and that means I’ve gone on too long. So I’ll just mention a final synchronicity between your humble editor and the cozy world at large: our interview with the talented and charming Phyllis Ann Karr. I suspect the universe intended me to stumble upon Phyllis’s contact info. And I suspect you’ll find out why sooner or later…

Until then, stay cozy!

Nathaniel Webb

August, 2023

THE GENTLE WORLD

A CONVERSATION WITH PHYLLIS ANN KARR

In 1986, Phyllis Ann Karr published At Amberleaf Fair , a novel that would fit quite comfortably in today’s cozy fantasy scene. Though it didn’t make a splash at the time, it’s accumulated something of a following over the intervening decades, including not just your humble editor but Hugo- and Nebula-winning author Jo Walton, who wrote at Tor.com, It’s gentle and delightful and I genuinely really like this odd sweet little book.

Interestingly, 1986 also saw the publication of Redwall and Howl’s Moving Castle, two titles that went on to become foundation stones of cozy fantasy. But while those spawned a lengthy series and a hit film respectively, Phyllis’s quiet, quirky tale of Torin the Toymaker and his travails in love and magic seemed destined to remain a cult classic.

So when Phyllis’s contact info crossed my desk, I leapt at the chance to make a connection. I hoped to unearth something about the genesis of At Amberleaf Fair and the mid-eighties fantasy scene in which it was written, but also, perhaps, do my small part in bringing more attention to a lost cozy classic. I didn’t foresee that I’d find Phyllis such a warm, witty, chatty interviewee—what follows has been, if you can believe it, assiduously edited for length on both our parts—nor did I anticipate the curious and cozy story behind Amberleaf itself…

Hello, Phyllis! Thanks so much for taking the time to chat with me. We should probably start with some introductions. For anyone who doesn’t know your work, could you tell us a bit about your career as an author?

My career as a writer might be said to have started in second grade, with a novel entitled Two Sisters of Switzerland, heavily derivative of Heidi, more immediately derivative of a game I played with a good friend about my own age, a next-door neighbor. If God is merciful, it will never be published.

Equally important as Heidi to my pre-kindergarten years were Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. Mom read me Looking-Glass about twice as often as Wonderland, and almost to the end of her life we were still quoting some of its lengthy conversations to each other. One more book I should probably mention from those years: The Rose and the Ring, by Thackeray. Then when I was in about fourth grade, Mom obtained through a bookfinder (a pre-Internet way of getting out-of-print books) a secondhand copy of one of her own childhood favorites, The Water-Babies, by Charles Kingsley. To this day, I regard The Water-Babies as a seriously neglected classic.

And, of course, there were the Oz books. Our local town library had several of them, from The Land of Oz to The Emerald City of Oz. Curiously enough, where and when I was a kid, it seemed harder to get hold of the first of them all, The Wonderful Wizard, which was thus better known to me from the 1939 movie.

In my high school days, I became a Maverickie the way a decade or so later people were to become Trekkies. [Maverick was a TV Western that ran from 1957 to 1962 on ABC. It starred Jack Kelly and others as the Maverick brothers, who traveled the Old West, playing poker and getting into scrapes.] If Warner Brothers had had the attitude about fannish fiction which Paramount was later to show when it came to Star Trek, my writing career would have been hatched with clan Maverick, especially Bart (the one played by Jack Kelly), and small doubt but that it would have featured a lot more American-based settings. Since Warner Brothers was, and as far as I know still is, of the firm opinion that the Mavericks—as Mavericks—cannot possibly filter through anybody but WB, I turned to Gilbert and Sullivan, whose stories went into public domain in 1961. At Amberleaf Fair owes its existence to Gilbert and Sullivan’s tenth opera, Ruddigore, which has been a dominant keynote throughout my life.

Hold that thought! We’ll get back to Amberleaf. When did you make the leap from passionate amateur to working writer?

While I remember being ready to make the move to working writer during my last undergraduate years at CSU, a perceived pressure to earn something like money forced me into (high-paying?) public library work, then after about three years into earning a Master’s in Library Science, after which I spent five years cataloguing rare and general-collection books at the University of Louisville. Those were good years; but whenever any library project headed by a man was put into motion, I was made to suspend my work on the Rare Book Room backlog in order to join whatever the new effort was.

Finally, just about the time I was coming up for tenure, they decided to reclassify all the library’s old Dewey Decimal books into Library of Congress numbers. In fact, we already had control over these volumes, while we still didn’t even know which and how many of the large Rare Book Room backlog, still awaiting any classification at all, were even worth keeping. So, disgusted at last, I turned in my notice and told the Curator of Rare Books that if he ever hoped to get that backlog sorted and classified, he had better see to it that my position was refilled with a male cataloger. This was the 1970s, and the public library system where I had worked before U of L had still been insisting that all its female employers wear skirts on the job—no pants suits, however staid and tasteful! So, while I can never remember being subjected to sexual harassment, I do feel I was the victim of sexual discrimination.

I spent my last year of living in Louisville striving to Get Published. That was the year I first drafted The Bloody Herring. The following summer I took George R. R. Martin’s summer workshop for writers at the small college in Iowa where he was then teaching, and Frostflower and Thorn were born. The following year, at another writer’s summer workshop, this one at Indiana University, my novel about them attracted the attention of my first agent, the excellent Barbara Lowenstein, who for several years placed my books with publishers. But she went into agenting all nonfiction and I had less success with subsequent agents.

The market might have changed, or perhaps the trouble was that I kept trying to do new and different things. Partly this was in spite of my observation that the writers who keep repeating their own successful formulae seem by and large to enjoy a lot more commercial success, at least in their own lifetimes, than those who like to experiment. It’s a phenomenon that as a reader I understand. To use some perhaps outdated examples, when you pick up a novel by Barbara Cartland or P. G. Wodehouse, you pretty well know what you’re getting; when you pick up one by John Hersey, it may well prove a whole new world according to Hersey.

You were publishing period romance at the same time as the Frostflower and Thorn books, as well as The Idylls of the Queen, an Arthurian mystery that remains one of your best-known works. Were you afraid of getting boxed in?

In all fairness, I must admit that I have always been ready and willing to repeat myself for the market. I rarely set out with any character whom I fail to consider for a potential series. But in the 1970s and ’80s, when every other writer in the SF/Fantasy field was moaning and groaning that their publishers forced them to do trilogies and didn’t want anything else but trilogies, my publishers wouldn’t let me do one! Frostflower and Thorn should have been a trilogy, but I guess the second book, Frostflower and Windbourne, fell so far behind the first in sales that Ace/Berkley decided they didn’t want the third. At this remove of decades, I agree that F&W isn’t as good as F&T; but I think the third one, which might have been titled Frostflower’s Choice, could have been really excellent.

All right, let’s talk about At Amberleaf Fair. That’s the book of yours that caught my attention last year. Between the personal stakes—romance, family, friendship—and the small, colorful fairground setting, it fits right in with today’s cozy fantasy, but it was published in 1986. How did Amberleaf come about? What inspired you to write it?

One seminal volume I have saved mentioning until now was the 1941 edition of Simon and Schuster’s Treasury of Gilbert & Sullivan. The illustrations by Lucille Corcos made it one of my very favorite picture books from the age at which I could first turn pages, and in seventh grade, from Deems Taylor’s plot synopsis alone, I fell head over ears in love with Ruddigore. [Ruddigore; or, the Witch’s Curse was Gilbert and Sullivan’s tenth opera. It wasn’t received as well as its immediate predecessor The Mikado, nor is it as well remembered now.]

What I now consider my journeyman novel, The Ring of Tumboni, begun in 1968 and finished about 1971 or ’72, features Robin Oakapple/Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd [the disguised comic hero of Ruddigore] as one of six protagonal characters in a long Tolkien Very Light kind of adventure. By later in the 1970s, I had penned two or three sequel short stories to Tumboni, as well as one comparatively down-to-earth short story concerning Sir Ruthven’s life in the week supposed to elapse between the opera’s two acts.

On becoming acquainted with one of my favorite editors, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, the Robin short stories were among those I submitted for her publications. She rejected them with indications that she wasn’t interested in the character. I made up my mind that she was going to buy a story about him, so I re-imagined him in a pure fantasy setting and came up with Torin the Toymaker. Torin stories, she bought, even including two of them in Tales by Moonlight (1983), an anthology of otherwise scary fantasy.

This is a digression, but I’m intrigued that Torin the Toymaker was created to sell to Salmonson, who’s best known for sword & sorcery. She edited some major S&S anthologies in the eighties, Amazons! for DAW and Heroic Visions for Ace. Not what you normally think of as cozy—though your Torin story Tales Told to a Toymaker actually debuted in Heroic Visions! Why did you like her so much as an editor?

Jessica Amanda Salmonson became a good and valued friend to me. Our literary tastes are in some ways almost diametrically opposed, and yet I used to find some pretty desirable (to me) volumes in her Violet Books catalog. Speaking of her as an editor, I can’t remember any case where she made any unauthorized changes in my text. (Here and there, other editors have split infinitives I never would have split, inserted adverbs I never would have inserted, cut things which seemed to me of crucial importance—all without telling me in advance, so that I never knew it was done until seeing the work in print.) Jessica was always honest and upfront with me—when she didn’t like a piece of work, she sent it back saying so; when she did, she bought and treated it respectfully.

I can see why she attracted so much talent. Okay, so you created Torin the Toymaker as a way to tell stories about Robin/Sir Ruthven from Ruddigore. How does that get us to Amberleaf?