This is a bit of my episode with Joseph Knowles in which we talk his efforts to inspire wonder and awe through stories of high strangeness. Hear the whole episode below. Enjoy.
Penjammin: So what we're really talking about is Silence and Starsong. Most people aren't going to hear that and know exactly what I'm talking about. Would you please fix that for us? What is Science Starsong, and what's distinctive about it, too?
Joseph: Sure. Silence and Starsong is a fiction magazine of which I am the editor. Our tagline is inspiring wonder and awe through stories of high strangeness. And even that itself might not mean a lot to a lot of people, but it's kind of latching on to something that C.S. Lewis talked about. It's a little bit inspired by his space trilogy books.
This April will be the two-year anniversary of our first print magazine issue, and we publish short stories in a variety of genres. So we have a lot of science fiction and fantasy, a healthy dose of stories you probably just have to call horror stories, one or two that might fall under the broad label of fairy tales. We have a couple of Westerns and a number that you just have to call “That's just kind of weird. That's just a weird story.”
Penjammin: Well, there's the high strangeness part, bringing that to bear. They're doing the heavy lifting on that one, I guess.
Silence and Starsong, what's that from?
Joseph: Well, the idea for doing a magazine to begin with came up in a group chat of online friends. And every now and then we would joke back and forth “There's another idea for my novel” or “There's another idea for my story collection.” And one day somebody said why don't we just actually do thi? Amongst amongst a few of us, we could we could put together a little anthology.
And from there it kind of grew to: Well, why don't we just throw the idea out there and see if anybody else is interested? So we had to come up with a name, and . . .
Here more:
Penjammin grew up in a labyrinthine cavern. Later he ran with the wolves and lived every moment marinated in the sweet scent of his game, until pirates landed and… (see “About”). Get his eletter at penjams.com/subscribe.