{"id":15214,"date":"2016-02-26T10:13:00","date_gmt":"2016-02-26T18:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2016\/02\/26\/15214.html"},"modified":"2016-02-26T10:13:00","modified_gmt":"2016-02-26T18:13:00","slug":"sh-flashback-late-for-dinner-b","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2016\/02\/26\/sh-flashback-late-for-dinner-b\/","title":{"rendered":"SH Flashback: “Late for Dinner,” by Ursula Pflug"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A new entry in my weekly Strange Horizons<\/cite> retrospective:<\/p>\n

\n
“Late for Dinner<\/a>,” by Ursula Pflug<\/dt>\n
A compelling and lovely magical-realist story about a young liberal woman (whose mother committed suicide) who crosses the border to live with the once-enslaved rebels in a nation at war. Among other things, it looks at the difficulty of communication across gaps of privilege and of culture and of experience. (Published in 2001.) (5,000 words.)<\/dd>\n
“It was [my father] who'd first told me about the war, dragging me to a rally when I'd wanted to stay home and watch television: ‘This country is knee-deep in bones.’”<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n

(See also the full list of Flashback stories<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

SPOILERS FOLLOW<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

The past is another country.<\/p>\n

I am not often a fan of ambiguity; but in some cases, including this one, part of the appeal of a story for me is the ways in which it slips back and forth across the boundary between literal and metaphorical, and the ways in which it literalizes metaphors.<\/p>\n

On one level, this could be a story set in any fictional nation at war; on another level, it's the slightly-sfnalized story of a white Canadian woman in the 1960s who has come to the US and has a black American lover. I like the ways in which that ambiguity plays out.<\/p>\n

...If I were editing this story today, I would probably ask Ursula to make a few small further changes to it. I'm not entirely politically comfortable with a couple of the nuances; and given that it was written by a white Canadian woman and edited by a white American man, it was probably inevitable that the story frames a couple of things in ways that I consider a little unfortunate in retrospect. But I'm hoping that those aspects can be forgiven, because I think the story nonetheless gets at some interesting and useful things.<\/p>\n

I'm also pleased that Ursula suggested using one of her mother's paintings as an illustration for the story. Christiane Pflug<\/a> was a Canadian magic-realist painter who committed suicide in 1972; I think the use of her art here lent some resonances to the mother\/daughter aspects of the story.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new entry in my weekly Strange Horizons retrospective: “Late for Dinner,” by Ursula Pflug A compelling and lovely magical-realist…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-short-stories","category-strange-horizons"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15214"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15214\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}