What were my goals and intentions in writing this collection of short stories? I believe that love is the greatest force in the universe. It empowers us and it makes us stronger. Love helps us to find out who we are and who we are with another person. We are often a better person because we are loved. Someone has deemed us worthy of being loved and cared for, of being wanted. When we are loved, we are more ourselves, the selves we were meant to be. I wanted to being in love, being loved, in a variety of places and times, including other planets and alternate universes, in our home towns, the end of the world, among other places and times. I wanted to examine love under stress, when it may be lost, or stolen, when it is tested. In some ways, all of my stories are love stories, in particular queer love stories. One writes what one knows. I would argue that this aphorism also means writing what one needs to know. That’s another interview.
For example, in the title story, “The Great Forest,” Edvard is the ugly duckling of his family. He is the unplanned child, always lacking the luster of his older brothers. He feel he is a constant disappointment to his parents. Suffering from anxiety and panic disorder, he suffers from extreme shyness to the point, he never has had the chance to discover himself and to know of what he is capable. Then, he falls in love. When his lover, Luc, is given to the Holy Trees to serve them for seven years, Edvard learns what it means to be empowered by love.
How well did I succeed in achieving my goals and intentions? On the whole, I feel I was successful. On the other hand, I also feel striving to achieve a goal is always a work in progress.
What inspired me to write these stories? Since my inspirations come from so many things and parts of my life, the best way to answer this question is to look at some of the individual stories. “The Great Forest” has roots in one of my alternate universes that I visit from time to time. This particular universe, that of the interstellar Human Community in the 26th century, is an old one, beginning in junior high (yes, really), when I read MacKinlay Kantor’s 1961 short novel, If the South Had Won the Civil War. I have read other such tales since then, that are more realistic and deal more honestly with the horrors of a Southern victory, but this is where my fascination began. I began playing with my own version, and so far, have created a time line of about 700 years. Briefly, the Confederacy survives until the 1960s and is destroyed when African Americans revolt. The resulting power vacuum brings on World War III and the collapse of the northern hemisphere, and eventually a Second Renaissance. Other inspirations for this tale include reading Peter Wohlben’s Hidden Lives of Trees, my love for post-apocalyptic tales, fairy tales, and other odds and ends.
I promise, I will be briefer! “The Tale of Robert and Phillip and the Bookstore,” was initially inspired by Baine’s Books and Coffee, a favorite bookstore in Scottsville, Virginia, and my love of Greek mythology. “Silver Rising” grew out of a flash fiction story I wrote for the Queer Sci Fi contest, with the prompt, Rise. “Snowfall” was partly inspired by thinking of snow as a blanket or a shroud, and sleeping, sleeping, in the cold.
You get the idea. I think the point I am trying to make is this: fiction is autobiography, and yes, the converse, autobiography is fiction. For example: I was a school librarian for 11 years, and I love librarians as heroes. In this collection, one of the heroes of “Silver Rising,” Geoffrey is a librarian. I was an English professor for 23 years. Chris, in “On the Radio,” teaches English at the University of Mary Washington, where I taught for 20 of those 23 years. Oliver, in “Silver Rising,” teaches English at Monticello High School, which was next door to where I lived in Albemarle County, outside of Charlottesville.
But I digress.
What am I working on now? I am writing “In Love’s Light,” a short story for a forthcoming anthology of JMS Books authors,, Love is Free, forthcoming from JMS Books in January 2025.
Warren Rochelle has a new FF/MM romance fantasy/sci-fi short story collection out: The Great Forest and Other Love Stories. And there’s a giveaway!
“The course of true love never did run smooth” might be a cliché, but for the lovers in these stories, it’s an understatement. Consider: having to rescue your beloved from seven years of service to sentient trees, or your lover wants you to curse an entire town, or your husband is sure aliens are calling to him from a comet. Find out what happens in these and other stories in The Great Forest and Other Love Stories.
Warnings: neglectful parents, end of the world
Universal Buy Link
Amazon
Warren is giving away a $20 Amazon gift card with this tour:
Chesapeake Air and Spaceport, North Terminal, Interplanetary Concourse A
The sun shimmered on the water, as the train pulled into the Chesapeake Air and Spaceport RR station. He gathered his things and walked out onto a winding path, into a garden of dwarf sugar maples and ash trees. The path led him over a little bridge and a stream, and lavender star-shaped flowers. He stopped there to collect himself, to remember what his therapists had taught him, Alana on Avalon, and Gavin and Julia, at Blue Ridge. Deep breaths, center and focus on the safe, on the gurgle of the stream below his feet, the star-shaped flowers, blooming by the water. Interrupt his fear-talk looping, be present now. The main building of the spaceport was straight ahead. The building seemed almost made of sunlight and water. Sea turtles, eels, dolphins, and sea horses seemed to be swimming inside its walls.
Inside, the spaceport would be filled with people from all across Terra, from who knew how many HC planets. And aliens. Strangers, all of them. Breathe in for three, hold for four, release for five. Center. Through the sliding glassteel doors, follow the signs to the ticket kiosks. Everybody was busy, going, coming. Edvard was just one more young human.
He could do this, and he had done it. He could do it again. He could hear Luc telling him that, as he touched him, kissed him.
I’m coming.
No answer.
Scattered trees inside, fountains and pools. Whoever designed the spaceport must have wanted it to look as if it was part of the bay itself. Water currents and tree-shapes in the metal and glassteel, the beams, and the afternoon sun visible in a great skylight over the departure lobby. Were those real birds flying overhead? Edvard caught the off-world accents he knew as he walked—Avalonian, Jardinero, New Scandinavian. A trio of enhanced chimpanzees, clearly traveling on business. He tried to stare at the nest of Kalsons traveling together, with their pointed ears, white-gold hair, and skin. Like Luc and his father. There were a few Kalsons like Manon with skin a darker gold, hair, a deep brown. He stepped back, as did everyone around him, at who he saw next coming down the concourse. Even though the Second Interstellar War had ended thirty-three standard years ago, clearly not enough time had passed for any Zoki to walk through the one of the largest spaceports on the North American east coast without armed HC security. No one had forgotten how many thousands of Wertyngeris had either died or were put in hibernacula for years, or how many of the frozen had been thawed and eaten. No one had forgotten how many HC soldiers died in the war. Yes, the war had ended with a palace coup, led by the Zoki crown princess. She had immediately offered reparations for the atrocities on Wertynger, and they had been paid, and were still being paid.
Edvard watched as the reptilian Zoki, all dressed in white, with ashes on their forehead, walked silently through the spaceport, staring at the floor. According to the treaty ending the war, the Zoki had to publicly atone for eating sentient life. The crown princess, now empress, had suggested fifty Terran standard years of shame and public penance. She had acknowledged that not all Zoki had known or participated, but the government she had overthrown had known, and it had had wide popular support.
Never again.
Someone spat on the floor as the Zoki and their guards walked past. He wondered if fifty Terran standard would be enough penance.
Edvard stepped in front of a ticket kiosk beside a family which was clearly emigrating. Everybody seemed to be carrying some sort of luggage, the three kids, the two dads. He inserted his passport and Universal ID into the kiosk, and selected shuttle to the station, star service to Wertynger, Next available ship, leaving Union Station. An option for stasis for the three week trip in hyperspace? Maybe after week one. Micro-cabin, no, too claustrophobic. Single double, Family? Single. It felt like forever for funds verification. Ding! Transaction complete. Please proceed to Concourse B, Gate 29, shuttle already boarding. Proceed to gate, please have ID and passport ready.
He had done it.
Warren Rochelle lives in Crozet, Virginia, with his husband, and their little dog, Gypsy. He retired from teaching English and Creative Writing at the University of Mary Washington in 2020. His short fiction and poetry have been published in such journals and anthologies as Icarus, North Carolina Literary Review, Forbidden Lines, Aboriginal Science Fiction, Collective Fallout, Queer Fish 2, Empty Oaks, Quantum Fairy Tales, Migration, Clarity, Innovation, The Silver Gryphon, Jaelle Her Book, Colonnades, and Graffiti, as well as the Asheville Poetry Review, GW Magazine, Crucible, The Charlotte Poetry Review, and Romance and Beyond. His short story, “The Golden Boy,” was a finalist for the 2004 Spectrum Award for Short Fiction.
Rochelle is the author of five novels, including The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and The Called (2010), all published by Golden Gryphon Press. The Werewolf and His Boy, originally published by Samhain Publishing in September 2016, was re-released from JMS Books in August 2020. In Light’s Shadow: A Fairy Tale was published by JMS Books in 2022.
Author Website: https://kingdomofjoria.com/
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Author Liminal Fiction (LimFic.com): https://www.limfic.com/mbm-book-author/warren-rochelle/
