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FOOTPRINTS A short story This work of fiction is dedicated to the memory of the wildlife preserve animals in Ohio who after a brief taste of freedom lost their lives. Any resemblance between the characters portrayed in this story and real persons alive or dead is purely coincidental. "This morning, I saw two sasquatch-sized footprints side-by-side in the slush on the porch, as if a mythical creature had stood there for a moment wishing he were real." Suzanne was sitting on a vinyl and chrome chair hunched over a laptop in the waiting room of a walk-in clinic, proofreading what she'd just typed.  Not certain she understood it he

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GETTING PUBLISHED: THE TRADITIONAL WAY A tutorial by M. Alice Chown If, like me, you have stories lying around gathering virtual dust on your hard drive, why not send them out to a publisher? You have nothing to lose. A couple of years ago, I attended the launch of an annual Canadian short story anthology, called Tesseracts 10. I knew one of the authors whose speculative fiction piece had been included in the book. Matthew Johnson and I had taken the same creative writing course. Our former prof, author, Robert Sawyer, was there at the launch too, as well as the editors of the anthology. Those who had contributed a story to Tesseracts 10 to

Ode to an Unlovely Tree You oversized stick-in-the-mud. You unsightly tower of cellulose. Joyce Kilmer's ode to treedom, rote in public schoolers' heads, wasn't a tribute to you.  Even   doggerel barks up other trunks. If trees could be losers, you'd be the biggest.  Whether you're a white or green Ash, the emerald borer will devour your wilting foliage just the same, if the tent caterpillars don't get you first. A stool hewn from your lumber would teeter on two legs.  A sail boat would keel over; a porch would dilapidate; a rocker would roll into the grave.  An upended coff

CRITIQUING THEMES AND MEANING IN LITERATURE By M. Alice Chown If you were a caveperson gazing up at the night sky, you'd search the stars and the blackness between for a meaning.  The constellations, which are based on myths handed down by the ancient Greeks, stand as examples of our innate desire to find a message in a medium. It's human nature to seek meaning.  Our brains naturally fill in missing information to perceive order and sense even where none may exist.  Likewise, during the act of reading, our brains try to find meaning beyond that which is expressed by the individual words.  It's diffic

THE MICROBOT, THE CROW AND THE WHISTLE A novella by M. Alice Chown     Flee!  One thought.  One taste.  The thought of fleeing toward the taste of fresh air.       The microbot scurried over smoldering debris through acrid-tasting smoke toward the gaping hole in the wall of the lab.  It blundered over a singed baseball cap, emblazoned with the logo of the Cybernetics Liberation League, oblivious to the wailing sirens and the cries of human agony.  Pain shot through it when a cinder landed on its back, but it had no voice with which to scream.  Its artificial heart pounding and its natural lungs gasping, it knew only to flee in the direct