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Lucius Shepard published his first story of the immobilized, mountainous dragon named Griaule in 1984, and each of the four stories since "The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule" has furthered the purpose of showing up the evasive, escapist stupidities at the heart of the phrase once upon a time.

Or maybe that wasn't their purpose, in Shepard's mind. It doesn't matter. Purpose or not, it is their effect, and it is an effect that grows out of the stories' distant relation to fairy tales of dragons and maidens and gallant knights and, as a Shepard character might say, all that horseshit.

Thanks to Subterranean Press, we now have the five Dragon Griaule stories (novellas, mostly) together between two covers instead of scattered through various anthologies and magazines, along with a new novella, "The Skull." For the first time, it's easy to read them one after the other. We can spy on their correlations, theorize their conjunctions, and spelunk through the shadows linking their darkest caverns. On their own, the stories are moments of myth, shards of a fantasy land that, it turns out, is just around the corner from our own. Together with the added narrative iterations of "The Skull," the stories show themselves to be a tapestry of texts, histories, myths, horrors, deceits, contrivances, lies, illusions, and, in the end, hopes.

W.E. Marden  (Daniel Quentin Steele) is a Jacksonville author and native Floridian. A former educator, he has been a journalist and public relations professional. He has covered and reported on crime and cops, courts and trials in several Florida cities. He has worked as a speech writer and political and media consultant. He has had one novel published in the U.S. and Great Britain as well as short stories published in the U.S., Canada, Australia and England.

Hi William, Please tell everyone a bit about yourself.

William: I’ve worked in newspapers, P.R. and education, but I’ve always been a writer; whatever paid my bills. In the last two years, I’ve experienced a creative and personal rebirth. I’d spent years getting ready to glide into an uneventful and quiet countdown to death when something funny happened. There’s nothing like thinking you’re going to lose it all, and probably die, to wake you up to the beauty of living every day. I have married, loved, lost, changed jobs, lost people I loved, been unemployed, been defeated again and again, but I’m still here. However, none of those things are why I’m really here. What I write, what I put down on paper or in electronic form, those are why I’m here. I’m a writer. That’s the bottom line.

When did the writing bug bite, and in what genre(s)?

William: In the fifth grade. I wrote a short story about some friends of mine and myself in an adventure in a mine. I read it in class. My teacher and the other kids in my class loved it.  I was hooked.  The genre was adventure. The first genres I wrote seriously in as an adult were science fiction, fantasy and horror.

When you started writing, what goals did you want to accomplish? Is there a message you want readers to grasp?

William:  I wanted to write short stories and later novels that would sell/be published. I’ve always been an avid reader and simply wanted to be published in the magazines I’d read and have other people read and enjoy my work the way I’d read other authors. I’ve never had a ‘message’ per se.

Briefly tell us about your latest book. Is it part of a series or stand-alone?

William:  My latest work is a complete departure from anything else I’ve ever written. It’s one novel, broken into four volumes for purposes of length.  Each volume until the final  breaks on a nail-biter, a cliffhanger. The series or overall novel title is When We Were Married. Volume One is subtitled The Long Fall, and Volume Two is subtitled Second Acts. It is written under the Daniel Quentin Steele pseudonym. This book (s) is mainstream with no fantasy elements. It’s set in Jacksonville Florida in 2005 and 2006 and tells the story of the end of the marriage between an obsessed prosecutor with the State Attorney’s Office and his beautiful University of North Florida professor/wife. The novel explores how Assistant State Attorney Bill Maitland and Debbie Maitland-Bascomb react to the end of their marriage, how Maitland prosecutes a variety of murderers and drug dealers while Debbie loses her husband, lover, children and finally her career in education and must make a new life for herself. The novel is a realistic behind the scenes look at the courtroom, cops and crime and features explicit sexual scenes during the end of the marriage and afterwards.

What’s the hook for the book? 

William: Four words: “When we were married.” The novel shows how four words said at the wrong time and place can destroy a twenty-year relationship, devastate a family,  shake a courthouse and send out ripples that will impact live

This is my third post for the great 2012 Caine Prize blogathon. (See my first post for some details.) 

My initial response to "Love on Trial" by Stanley Kenani (PDF) was: This is a terrible story. Preachy, obvious, awkward, tedious.

But then I thought about a letter I wrote to one of my college teachers back in the '90s, when people still wrote letters.

I had transferred from New York University after putting in three years toward a BFA in Dramatic Writing, and was now an English major at the University of New Hampshire. There were a few reasons for my transfer, mostly have to do with money, with a sense of disillusionment with the world of New York theatre, and with a crisis in confidence in my abilities as a writer of much of anything, dramatic or not. I got involved with the student theatre group at UNH and was cast as the lead in Paul Rudnick's play Jeffrey. I was coming to this after having spent three years trying to write the most obscure, abstract, confrontational, and bizarre theatre I could imagine. I had also spent a lot of time exploring various ideas of sexuality. My favorite teacher had been an avant-garde playwright and actor who often wrote difficult, complex, and sometimes sexually-explicit plays and monologues, generally from a very queer sensibility. I remembered him saying something in class about Jeffrey as a shallow play, or a reactionary play, or something like that. (He was a very kind and gentle fellow, and I think that's why I remembered his comment, or at least the general import of his comment: Jeffrey is not a good play.)

Our production of Jeffrey was, as far as anybody knew, the first gay play to be performed at UNH, and certainly the first play to be performed there with an opening scene in which men are in bed together talking about condoms, sex, etc. We easily sold out all of the performances and I've never, before or since, experienced the same sense of a community needing a particular piece of theatre so much. It was very much the right show at the right time in the right place.

And so that's what I wrote to my teacher. It was a revelation for me — it wasn't, I said, that Jeffrey is necessarily a bad play, but rather that it is a play that needs particular sorts of audiences, and the work it will do is different depending on those audiences. For a downtown New York theatre crowd, it's really not much. For the University of New Hampshire in the fall of 1997, it was just the catalyst necessary for all sorts of conversations that had been festering beneath the surface of the university's culture. (My teacher replied that he thought it was a very good insight, and also highlighted one of the unique virtues of the theatre: people enacting stories for each other in a specific place at a specific time.)

Which brings me back to Kenani's story, and not just because it, too, is about men who have sex with each other. (Basic plot: a local drunk in a Malawian village stumbles upon two young men having sex in a bathroom. The event becomes a national news story, the one man who can be identified is put on trial and sentenced to jail, and a TV news reporter has a long interview with him in which the young man expresses no shame in his gay identity and argues with the interviewer about the Bible, etc. Western countries find out what happened and impose economic sanctions on Malawi, causing much hardship across the country, including for the drunk who now can't afford alcohol and so has the DTs, as well as HIV, which he can't get medicine for because of sanctions.) I can imagine that there are probably audiences for whom this is a very good story — a story that dram

  It is a pleasure to announce the ongoing Golden Baobab Prize, a literary award that annually invites entries of unpublished African-inspired stories written for an audience of ages 8-11 years or 12-15 years.  The mission of the Golden Baobab Prize is to identify the African literary giants of the next generation and produce excellent stories that will be appreciated for years to come.

The Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, the Philippines' longest-running literary competition, aims to help develop Philippine literature by providing incentives for writers to craft their most outstanding literary works, serving as a treasury of Philippine literary gems, and assisting in the dissemination of Philippine literature to the public.

Writers may now submit their entries for this year's competition, in categories including:

English Division - Short Story for Children

English Division - Poetry for Children

Filipino Division - Maikling Kuwentong Pambata

Filipino Division - Tulang Pambata

English Kabataan Division (writers below 18 years old) - Kabataan Essay: “In the advent of e-books, do I still consider printed books to be an important part of education?”

Filipino Kabataan Division (writers below 18 years old) - Kabataan Sanaysay: “Sa paglaganap ng e-books, maituturing ko pa bang mahalagang bahagi ng edukasyon ang mga nakalimbag na aklat?”

The competition is open to all Filipino citizens and former Filipino citizens. Each writer may submit one entry per category and the deadline for submissions is midnight, April 30. Competition rules and official entry forms are available here.

Winners will be announced on September 1.

For more information, please email atcpawards@palancaawards.com.ph.