Uncanny Magazine – ojcade.com

I have a new poem out! To be perfectly honest it came out a couple of months ago, but I’m behind on updating the website, so I suppose if you haven’t come across said poem yet it’s new to you. Anyway, “Radioactivity” is free to read in the wonderful Uncanny Magazine. I’ve sold to Uncanny before, but never a poem, so it’s lovely to be in there again, and in a different form.

“Radioactivity” is a poem about Marie Curie. She’s a scientist I have always admired, and let’s face it, when you think of the history of women in science she’s at the very top, or close to it. My favourite story about her is referenced briefly in the poem. It’s about her cookbook. Now, when Marie was researching radiation, it was the big new thing in science and no-one really understood that it wasn’t the best idea to shove highly radioactive material in your pockets and handle it with bare hands and so on. But Marie had her hands and her pockets, and when she finished working in the lab for the day she’d go home and cook her family dinner, and when she did the radioactive material that was smeared all over her fingers transferred to the pages of her cookbook, as she flipped through it looking for recipes. That cookbook still exists. It’s in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and to this day it’s so radioactive that it needs to be kept in a lead-lined box.

I love that story. It makes Curie seem so utterly human… as does, I hope, the rest of the poem.

I have a new essay out! Most of what I put up on this blog is short stories or academic papers or books, and it’s only very rarely that I write a nonfiction, non-academic piece. But I’d like to start doing more of them, so this is one of the first.

It’s also the first piece I’ve ever managed to sell to Uncanny Magazine, which is one thing crossed off my writing bucket list. It’s an amazing magazine, and I’m so pleased to finally be in it. My essay, “Milk Teeth,” is free to read at the link.

It’s about New Zealand ecology. Mostly the moa (a giant and sadly extinct bird) and the horoeka (a plant which is happily still very much alive). The horoeka’s an odd-looking plant, and one of the theories as to why it looks and grows the way that it does is because the moa used to graze on it, and the plant adapted accordingly.

If this is true – and it seems a reasonable explanation – then this plant is still growing away, doing it’s odd spiky thing, completely oblivious to the fact that the reason for said spikiness is long dead and likely won’t be coming back. (I say “likely” because I live in hope that the thing can be resurrected, like a big feathery Jurassic Park creature that is rather less violently carnivorous. The probability of this resurrection is not high.)

And to me, that’s such an interesting relationship… one built, now, entirely around absence, and one that’s very much worth exploring.