Am I obsessed much with forests and jungles? 

I woke up this morning to the news that my story “Song of the Balsa Wood Bird” got a mention in the Reactor (formerly Tor.com) post “Seven Speculative Stories About Preserving History and Culture.”  This seems like a fitting time to mention my family’s road trip earlier this month, in which we preserved a bit of my personal history—and veered from it to put ourselves in a forest setting. 

We recreated my childhood summer road trips to the Bay Area to visit my maternal grandparents.  That is, we followed the path back up, spending the night in Ashland on the way; on the way down, though, we took a different route to see the famed redwoods. 

It was magnificent.  I’d researched long-lived trees such as these for a certain recent story of mine (and hopefully that’s not too much of a spoiler).  Getting to touch them was something else.  I loved feeling so small, like a character in “A Petrified Heart.”  My husband noted how quiet and still everything was, and sure enough, we didn’t hear much birdsong, rather like in “Song of the Balsa Wood Bird.” 

I’ll be talking about another of my rainforest stories, “Venom in the Cloud Forest,” on a podcast next month.  And a new story, “Ree in the Domain of Scavengers,” is coming out in Flame Tree Publishing’s Sun Rising Short Stories the month after that.  And I had such a kick setting a horror story in the rainforest with “Discount Night at the Haunted Eco Lodge.” 

Okay, yes, I’m obsessed. 

Anyway, San Francisco was great.  We went to some of my favorite spots, including Pier 39 and Chinatown.  We laid flowers at the grave of my grandparents and one of my uncles.  In that sense, I did visit Grandma and Grandpa, like all those summers growing up, preserving a bit of my own family history and bringing the next generation along.