What a month this has been, but here after much delay is Part 2 of The Heart of Summer.
At the core of the second part of this book, and perhaps the collection as a whole, is a short story (novella, really) titled “The Country of Desire,” about a gay Filipino man and his life from childhood through the end of his first major relationship. It is immediately preceded by four stories that speak to moments of upheaval in personal relationships.
In titular story “The Heart of Summer” our protagonist (not explicitly gendered, but reads male to me), is an outsider for having moved to a new neighborhood, one that makes their commute to school longer and more frustrating, though they do find connection with a young man in their new community. It is also a move that is soured by the forced nature of it, their family been priced out of their previous home by a rent increase. In “Wings of Desire,” a nostalgic feeling trip to Manila ends in the young protagonist learning that it was to his cousin’s funeral, where his aunt is counseled not to tell her husband (who works far away on a ship) that their son has died. Following that, “A Various Season,” follows a poor university student as he tries to navigate his relationships with his wealthy classmates on a celebratory trip to the beach.
“Letter to Brian,” a wonderful epistolary piece, then explores a gay relationship that falls apart. We are given a snapshot of a moment in a letter, perhaps the moment that the first red flags of failure started to emerge, self centeredness, weaponized low-self esteem, “I hope you won’t abandon me the way my parents did.” This launches us into “The Country of Desire,” and I know the author well enough to say that there are a sprinkling of autobiographical elements, though it is still soundly fiction. We first meet Jaun/Jon the student, the rebel who fits in so his rebellion won’t be noticed. Then we met the boys and men who drew his attention over the years, the gay people he knew, the queer situation he found himself in as he went to school and worked and travelled abroad. Like the previous story, we end on a relationship that doesn’t last as well as a clash of cultures, as this story asks us to consider the variance in queer cultures from different countries.
The four stories that conclude The Heart of Summer are very short. Just 18 pages for all four. In “Ghosts” our narrator tells us about the ghosts that have followed them through their life from the ghosts of family members to a famous castle ghost. “Child of the Ash Covered Sky” is a short story about a volcano eruption that impacted the Philippines and is a haunting reflection on a world blanketed in white ash from a child’s perspective. “Parable of the Summer No. 2: The Sea” is a brief two page tale, a mediation on fear, teaching, family, the sea, and more surely if you keep looking and read it over again. The collection ends with “The Fireflies,” two stories in one. A boy collecting fireflies in his yard and a fairy tale, of a King who losing a ring and grants a wish to a firefly. It presents you with two different endings, so you can choose to end your time with the collection however you please.
The Heart of Summer is a wonderful collection that speaks to change, hardship, family, and love beautifully, and I strongly encourage anyone who enjoys both slice of life and fable-style fantasy.
This behind the scenes reading post primarily reflects the beginning of the Spring semester, weirdly enough, because the semester started at the tail end of January. I didn’t read a lot over Winter Break, and what I did ended up becoming other posts. For example, I did a lot of World of Darkness sourcebook reading, but that was for an article of its own, and Half (my beloved), of course, was January’s review.
I have actually done a lot more reading than this, but it’s been mostly student work, which for obvious reasons, I’m not including here. But yeah, in addition to all these great books, you can just envision me drowning in piles and piles of student essays. The Spring post is likely going to be a lot bigger as I read more and more for my classes and keep playing new TTRPGs as part of the role-playing club I’ve joined to keep myself sane.
Finished:
The Enigma of Amigara Fault by Junji Ito — I’d never actually read anything by Junji Ito in full up until now. I’d, of course, seen the bits floating around the internet, including the meme that came from this comic, so when I stumbled into a digital copy I figured it was as good a time as any to read it. Given my love of weird horror, I adored it. I mean, perfectly human shaped holes appearing in a mountain after an earthquake and people feeling drawn to enter them? Amazing. I didn’t find the reading experience earth shifting/reality altering the way some people find Junji Ito’s work, but perhaps I just haven’t hit on The One just yet.
Cherokee Stories of the Turtle Island Liars’ Club, Introduction and Chapter 1, written by Christopher B. Teuton (Cherokee) — What is Cherokee storytelling like, and who are Cherokee storytellers? This book explores Cherokee storytelling as a fundamental part of Cherokee culture, through stories told and lessons taught by Hastings Shade, Sammy Still, Sequoyah Guess, and Woody Hanson. This was one of the first things we read in the graduate seminar I am taking on Indigenous storytelling and archives, and I’d actually read the Introduction before in a different class during my undergrad. One day I’m going to read the whole book.
In Progress:
Stories of Our Living Ephemera: Storytelling Methodologies in the Archives of the Cherokee National Seminaries, 1847-1907 by Emily Legg (Cherokee) — Built from Dr. Legg’s doctoral dissertation, Stories of Our Living Ephemera explores research as ceremony and storytelling as methodology and the work of decolonizing Indigenous archives through Dr. Legg’s engagement with the archives Cherokee National Seminaries, two of the earliest higher education institutions in the United States. I’ve only made it through the first half-ish of the book, which explores her process of developing a methodology based in Indigenous practices through her dissertation work. The second half of the book will apply that methodology to what she found in the archives of the Cherokee National Seminaries, particularly the Cherokee Women’s Seminary.
Indigenous Storywork: Educating the Heart, Mind, Body, and Spirit by Jo-ann Archibald (Stó:lo) — Archibald presents the concept of “storywork,” not just telling stories, but understanding the work that stories can do and how they can nurture the whole body. I am not very far in (though I am supposed to be done, oops!), but it’s a fantastic book. Each chapter revolves around a specific story, which Archibald invokes to speak to the points she is making within the chapter.
Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory by Aja Y. Martinez — The first chapter of this book provides the best definition of critical race theory that I have ever read. For the academics out there it also lays out a fabulously clear definition of the difference between methodology (how you do a thing) and method (the tool you use to do the thing). This book, like the above two, should be finished, but teaching two classes while taking three is hard. Thankfully, I have an incredibly understanding professor.
Oratory on Oratory by Lee Maracle (Stó:lo)— Lee Maracle is a fabulous First Nations storyteller and scholar. We read two articles in my class on storytelling and archives, one I had read before (and so I have not listed here) and the other one, this one here, I am still working through. The article presents a First Nations methodology that speaks to Study and Oratory and how we can engage respectfully in research. I cannot recommend enough watching Lee Maracle tell stories. This is a long video, but it’s great, we watched the first 15 minutes in my storytelling class and I cannot recommend it enough.
A Filipino author (and scholar, reporter, teacher, actor, etc.), Danton Remoto brings the the complex beauty and stories of the Philippines to an English speaking audience. My favorite two stories (so far), are The Ruined Hotel, which layers the letting go of a loved one with the quieting of the spirit of a woman who died when a hotel collapsed in an earthquake, and The Two Women of Bantayan, which has a lot to say about perception and misinformation through the lens of stories that surround two local women, one a local story and one that the internet takes global.
It struck me as I was reading that the stories in The Heart of Summer are the kind of stories that I could see being taught in school. In high school we had these massive textbooks filled with short stories, and poems, and book excerpts that were selected and compiled because they were ripe for analysis and teaching moments. I could easily see the stories here being in a book like that, because of how layered and rich they are. And if not that, perhaps something to be read in an advanced creative writing workshop, like the one in which I read “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings.” An example of, “look how beautifully you can write life.”
There is also the fact that many of these stories speak to/about education and teaching. Beginning gives us the story of a student at the end of the school year turning in her last exam, her family, and the turn toward summer; The Chameleon Years tells us the story of Cesar, the teacher who made such a difference in his life, and what it means to return home; and Lola is a story within a story about an old woman who had a long life as a teacher alongside her husband, and what that meant. What it means is never a straightforward thing. The Chameleon Years, Lola, and The Young Emmanuel all speak to the instability of the education system, particularly if you are not already a person of means. Cesar and Emmanuel veer away from education for jobs that will make them money, even if they are unsatisfying at best. In Lola, Guillerma and her husband Alberto, both teachers, see the turbulent times they live in leave them unable to help their own children and grandchildren achieve the education they were blessed with.
Something else that I find incredibly beautiful about the stories in The Heart of Summer is that they speak to change in so many different ways. In the opening story, The Sound of the Sea, three children spend a final summer in the Philippines before moving abroad. Lola’s Vroom Vroom, placed immediately after Lola tells the story of the narrator’s grandmother at the end of her life, while The Girl Who Loved The Beatles could be said to be about the tension between modern and traditional ideas of mental health and teenage girls through invoking the supernatural, and The Snake is a snapshot of the Chinese family who lives next door to the narrator, particularly the Auntie and the implied mischief that might have happened in the last apartment building she lived in.
Both of the books in the Tea Dragon series that I’ve read have shared the theme of “finding what you want to do” both personally and in a chosen profession/trade. In The Tea Dragon Society, Greta reaffirms the path she was already on, with the addition of tea dragons. In The Tea Dragon Festival, however, new protagonist Rinn takes a different turn.
The Tea Dragon Festival turns back the clock and we are led by a young Erik and Hezekial, still in their adventuring days, to a small village in the mountains, where Rinn, Erik’s niece and forager extraordinaire, is struggling with cooking. She wants to cook and apprentice under the town’s head cook, but it’s a challenge. Then she finds a dragon who has been asleep for 80 years. And not one of the little tea dragons that live communally among the town, but a proper dragon dragon.
In a slice of life mystery, Erik and Hezekial try to figure out what caused the dragon, Aedhan of the Shining Wing Clan, to sleep for 80 years, while Aedhan, who had been sent by his clan to guard the town, grapples with the guilt of having neglected the town, even if it was unintentional, and Rinn tries to find her personal balance with foraging, cooking, and her new friendship with Aedhan, as the town prepares for the annual Tea Dragon Festival.
Now tea leaves from a tea dragon are special, they are special not only in their flavor, but also in their magic. You see, drinking tea from a tea dragon’s leaves can show the drinker memories of the tea dragon and their caretaker. In The Tea Dragon Society this is shown when Hezekial shares Jasmine’s tea with Greta. In The Tea Dragon Festival, however, we learn that the tea dragons in Rinn’s village are cared for communally by the whole village, meaning their leaves give a sense of communal memory. That could mean a lot for a dragon with an 80 year gap in his memory.
At the top I mentioned that Rinn’s decision is very different from Greta’s. Rinn realizes over the course of the book that while she has a great love of cooking, her skill in foraging is what she wants to nurture and make her professional specialization. She ends up turning down the village cook’s offer of an apprenticeship, because what she finds rewarding about cooking is feeding her friends and family, and through that, she is able to help Aedhan find his place in their community as well.
Her decision is no less correct than Greta’s, because the point isn’t just that you should do something important, but that you should do something that is important to you, and you can have passions and hobbies that aren’t what you do professionally.
On a final note, just like in The Tea Dragon Society we are given even more excellent disability representation through the prominent use of sign language throughout the book. This is shown via hand gestures visualized in the art, as well as through text boxes and speech bubbles that indicate when something is spoken only, signed only, or both spoken and signed. There’s even a handy guide in the front of the book, and further resources in the back.
World of Darkness is a game line that layers the worlds of supernatural beings over our real human world, everything from history to the modern day, and each new edition builds upon the lore of the previous editions. Oh, and also the lore of all the games under the WoD umbrella overlaps. This was a major reason that this had to be its own article, instead of an end note to my last Jewish ttrpg round-up. I was getting to know Vampire: The Masquerade, but the more I read and the further I dug into previous editions and other games—Mage: The Ascension, Wraith: The Oblivion, and Changeling: The Dreaming, among others—the more Jewish or Jewish-adjacent stuff I found.
The other reason this became its own article is that WoD is dark, and the tonal shift wound up being too jarring. WoD is horror with each game in its own sub-genre. Vampire is political intrigue, Wraith grapples with the horror of death, Changeling deals with more creeping emotional darkness. This means you are frequently confronted with the darker sides of human experience taken to extremes through the non-human, which is to say, your mileage will almost certainly vary. Something else that can factor into this, is the fact that WoD has placed all of their games over human history, making various historical events and figures involved in the supernatural and world communities and cultures are explored within, not just fantasy equivalents, which makes heavier topics hit closer to home.
Within that, WoD tends to be very Eurocentric, so the writing of non-White, non-Western cultures often ends up with some level of stereotype involved, even when done with the best intentions. For example, Changeling’s set up provides a primarily Eurocentric look at the fae, but they also include rules for Indigenous mythologies (primarily of Native American and Inuit groups). While there is something to be said for the fact that they said, “Hey, we recognize that Indigenous groups have their own, different, relationship with the world,” it still has the draw backs of coming from a non-Indigenous perspective that really could still have benefited from a sensitivity reader at the very least. The Jewish elements in Vampire and elsewhere are very much in the same boat, coupled with the fact that different writers on different books will do some things better than others.
Why Talk About This, Then?
The simple answer is that I enjoy Vampire: The Masquerade and Changeling: The Dreaming and I have experience in fandoms with decades of material, some of it being quite shit (X-Men), and then cherrypicking what I want to use. World of Darkness is very much like that. There’s almost too much to use everything: books contradict each other, editions change fundamental things, etc. etc. etc. Much of my knowledge comes from the 20th anniversary editions—even though several of the lines, Vampire included, are seeing updates to a new v5 edition—because that’s the edition I play in.
I spoke briefly about my Jewish Vampire character, Wren, in last month’s article because I made minis for her. She was initially built before I found all the Jewish elements in Vampire, but now she’s expanded so much, and I was able to use canon elements to do it, which was really astounding to me, because I’d never experienced a mainstream ttrpg that did anything like that, which made me invested, flaws and all. Below I’m going to end up talking quite critically about aspects of Vampire and other WoD games, but keep in mind that that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy/find value in them at the same time, and I’ll be talking about things I like too.
Half is a phenomenal book that is uniquely indicative of the very specific cultural context in which it emerged. The book was published in March of 1953—a scant four months after Christine Jorgensen’s story was leaked to the press in December of 1952—by science fiction author Cyril M. Kornbluth under the pseudonym Jordan Park. Publishing queer pulp fiction under a pseudonym was commonplace, and sometimes one author published under several. Kornbluth had had at least ten, but Jordan Park seems to be what he used for his queer pulp novels. I don’t know if Kornbluth was any flavor of queer himself, he was noted by his peers (which included Isaac Asimov) to have been eccentric, but he died young (34, heart attack), so we’ll likely never know.
Half is almost every trope in the book when it comes to a 1950s trans narrative, but it is very sincere. The big thing, and the reason that the book caught my attention, is that it is framed as the story of a hermaphrodite, an intersex person. But here’s the thing, that’s how Lili Elbe’s story was framed in her memoir too, and Karl Baer’s in his memoir. Two memoirs that were also notably fictionalized, which makes it hard at times to tell what is truth and what is a strategic argument to further trans acceptance and legitimize trans lives. It is also important to remember that in the 50s we’re still on the heels of this idea of sexuality and gender variance as a form “pseudo-hermaphrodism,” based off of sexological theory that was trying to legitimize these identities through science, which we now know to be pseudo-science, but was a genuine attempt at understanding gender at the time.
I know, I know, you came here for a book review, not the early development of my master’s thesis (of which this is, in fact, a part), but the context matters. No “trans-“ word is used in the book, even though transvestite was an established word in English and transsexual had recently emerged on the scene in English in 1949-50, but it is undeniably a trans narrative as well as an intersex one. The book opens with a chapter just half a page in length, the only time in the book our protagonist is Miss Stephanie Bankow, a concert singer, looking forward to becoming Mrs. Charles Wainwright. Because the next chapter goes all the way to the day Steven Bankow was born to a Polish immigrant family and the midwife went “this isn’t a boy or a girl, kill it maybe?” His dad, not a fan of infanticide, decided boy and we’re off to the races.
This marks an interesting theme throughout the book, of presenting a horrible/bad option for our protagonist, but then saying, vehemently, “No. This is not going to happen.” In primary school he got his first bully, who bullied him for sitting while he peed and cause he mentioned wanting to sew with the girls, but the principal says, “This is not going to happen on my watch,” and while the bullying is not gone, it is tempered. At several points Steven thinks about suicide, and we see the explicit bullying of and the ultimate suicide of another queer character, a gay boy named Joe Lieber, but that puts an end to Steven’s suicidal thoughts. He doesn’t want that for himself. When he’s at his lowest, drunk and struggling to hold a job, in waltzes Oscar-Oscarina, an older performer who shows off her intersex body. She’s too old for “the surgery,” she says, but Steven’s not and if he wants it he should go for it.
While both of those other queer characters mentioned are paralleled as routes that Steven won’t take, they are handled gracefully, much more so than I expected. The choir director at the high school has a very direct (if muted) “homophobia is bad” rant when Steven expresses not wanting to work with Joe and Steven and Joe do, in fact, become friends. Even when Joe dies, (almost an inevitability in 50s pulp fiction), his death is linked more to his father being abusive than it is to anything else. It doesn’t seem like his father knew his son was gay until after his death, so he comes across as more generic abusive parent than parent trying to beat the gay out of his kid. There’s also a whole, “cops will lie to get you to confess to something you didn’t do” moment, since of course Joe’s dad is convinced that Steven corrupted his son.
As to Oscar-Oscarina, she is largely quite comfortable with herself and is a kind guiding hand to Steven, reintroducing him to Lili Elbe, who Steven had over looked in a hunt through medical textbooks previously. It is also worth noting that Steven is only 18 at the end of the book, he has a full alcoholic midlife crisis at the ripe old age of 17. It sort of feels like a combination of “being forced to grow up fast because of WW2” and “youth is a requirement to transition” and “life is very hard on queer youth.”
The cover of the book exaggerates the misery and woe of an “awful abnormality,” a friendless existence, shunned by his parents, etc etc, but that’s really not the whole picture once you get into it. Steven’s parents are concerned about what might happen if Steven was found out, true, but Steven only really fears his father’s disappointment when he gets in to and then discharged (for medical reasons, iykwim) from the Army after his brother is killed in Pearl Harbor. Sure, he doesn’t have many friends, but he has Joe and he has Sophie, his “not-a-girlfriend” for whom their dating is a mutually beneficial performance. It is implied—through signals and gestures and me rereading the pages over and over and even then still questioning my interpretation of events, (all to get around the censors, presumably)—that Sophie was sexually assaulted by her father. For her, Steven is safe because he’s not interested in trying anything. For him, Sophie is safe because a relationship reifies his ever shaky feeling manhood.
While I don’t think it was intended to be a critique of toxic masculinity, it really came across that way. There are several times when Steven does something that he feels he should do because that’s what “men do” that ends up hurting Sophie, which he recognizes and immediately regrets. The implication here is that it’s because he really was a woman and that doing “men’s things” was unnatural for him, but it goes full circle into feeling an awful lot like “this stereotype of masculine behavior hurts women.”
Even though we don’t end up seeing Steven step into the life he is implied to have lead as Stephanie, the book leaves us with Steven having undergone the first part of surgery, having a crisis about his now removed penis, and then walking into the sunset, back into the hospital. It’s really quite an uplifting ending and not at all what I was expecting. I went in braced for a tragic death, maybe on the operating table, like Oscar-Oscarina mentioned happened to Lili Elbe (which was… oversimplified in the text, Lili did not die from the penectomy/vaginoplasty, as was implied, those went fine. She died from an attempt at a uterine transplant that did not take.) Instead, I got oddly modern sounding doctors who were like “Whether or not you enjoy your new parts is entirely up to you, psychologists say that if you really want it you’ll like it and if you don’t you won’t.”
While this whole section is talking about sexual pleasure, to a modern reader (and maybe even to a contemporary reader) it feels like the whole thing.
“It’s up to you.” In 1953, “It’s up to you.”
As a whole, I was thrilled with the book. It felt very easy to close the book and imagine that Steven was able to become Stephanie with no complications and have a grand life as a singer as she always wanted before settling down. Maybe she’d even go home and reconcile with Sophie, see her parents…
Now here’s the bad news. At this point, I usually have a link to give you where you can pick up your own copy or read it online if that’s an option. This book is so, utterly out of print that I could literally only find a single copy for sale online (very expensive). The copy I read was loaned to me by a collector I met at a queer conference last November and I will be forever grateful.
If you want to read this, my best recommendation is to check libraries and/or archives, and if you really want to own it, thrift stores and used book stores. Check the boxes/shelves of crumbly yellow pulp paperbacks that stink of decaying paper and you might find a hidden gem.
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References and Further Reading:
Memoirs of a Man’s Maiden Years by N. O. Body (Karl Baer)
Man into Woman by Lili Elbe & Neils Hoyer
Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender by Kit Heyam
Transvestites by Magnus Hirschfeld
Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography by Christine Jorgensen
Usually, when I finish a reading that I know will be on the quarterly post, I write the small blurb as soon as I’m done, and I did start this semester doing that… but then came the annotated bibliography assignment. I had to stop doing blog write ups of my reading, because I had a big academic write up of my reading to do. But I’m back now! (It’s winter break and I only have teaching prep to do.)
That said, this is a selection, of what I’ve read over the past semester. Notes on everything would be an impossible task when I was averaging 10-14 articles every week give or take. These are the Top Notch pieces that I want to share.
Finished:
Indigenous Research Methodologies, Chapter 11: “Decolonizing the Interview Method” by Bagele Chilisa – I think I would like this whole book. As it is, I only have one chapter. It hit me the same way my research into Indigenous rhetoric did. I think part of it is that I really vibe with the ethical frameworks of a lot of the Indigenous methodologies. This chapter really opened up what interviewing could mean as I began developing my semester’s research project.
Teaching Mindful Writers by Brian Jackson – This was one of the main texts we read in my teaching class. We didn’t read the book in order, instead reading it in the order of what topics we were discussing in class, but since this isn’t a narrative book, it didn’t really matter. It’s a really good book, very accessible for anyone who may be new to teaching, because it’s a genuinely engaging read as well as being a wealth of resources. Jackson’s honesty was also really nice because hearing an experienced teacher say “Yeah, my lessons still flop sometimes” is so reassuring. A lesson flopping doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a bad teacher.
School for Extraterrestrial Girls: Girls in Flight by Jeremy Whitley and Jamie Noguchi – A little something for me that I read in my (nonexistent) downtime. It’s the long awaited sequel to Girl on Fire, which I reviewed back in 2022. It’s so delightful and fun, very worth the wait. I admire the craft that goes into telling a fast paced, ensemble cast story of this length and be able to flawlessly hit emotional beats for multiple characters. Absolute masterclass.
Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others by Sara Ahmed – Phenomenology is such a dense, brain twisting thing to read about, but I loved it. I wish I’d had time to do more with this for my research paper, because it was the core of my annotated bibliography. I had been mostly unfamiliar with phenomenology before reading this, but the crash course in phenomenology and then immediately seeing it queered was pretty great. Looking behind objects and interrogating societal lines and spaces is very in line with how I approach research. If you feel up to tackling a bit of queer theory, I highly recommend this.
“In Ceremony with Grandmother Water Spider: Finding Balance Between Cherokee Rhetorical Models and the Academy” by Emily Legg – Emily Legg is an amazing scholar. It was her work with Indigenous rhetoric and storytelling that inspired me to pursue graduate studies in rhetoric. This multi-modal article presents the Cherokee medicine wheel as a rhetorical model and how Legg has used that to push back at the Western academy’s Eurocentrism and find a place for herself as an Indigenous scholar. If Indigenous history and scholarship is something that interests you, you should check out her new book, Stories of Our Living Ephemera: Storytelling Methodologies in the Archives of the Cherokee National Seminaries, 1846-1907, which “recovers the history of the Cherokee National Seminaries from scattered archives and colonized research practices.”
“Putting Trans* History on the Shelves: The Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria, Canada” by Aaron H. Devor and Lara Wilson – A great short piece about the process of creating a trans archive, specifically the Transgender Archives at UVic, and then when making an accessible looks like, what the dream is and what makes that difficult. I haven’t had much time to pursue their digitized offerings, but it is on my to do list.
“Autobiographical Text, Archives, and Activism: The Jane Rule Fonds and Her Unpublished Memoir, Taking My Life” by Linda M. Morra – A fascinating article that touches on how queer people use their memoirs as well as the ethical implications of publishing an unpublished, uncatalogued memoir manuscript, and all this done in the contact of what Morra knew about how Jane Rule lived her life as a queer activist.
This article and “Putting Trans* History on the Shelves” are in the collection Out of the Closet, Into the Archives: Researching Sexual Histories, which is a great collection all around. I’ve read other articles in it for other projects.
In Progress:
Equipping Technical Communicators for Social Justice Work: Theories, Methodologies, and Pedagogies edited by Rebecca Walton and Godwin Y. Agboka – This is a really stunning collection of technical/professional communication essays that bring non-Western, decolonial and other social justice-oriented frameworks to technical communication. I have not read every single article within, but I’ve read a fair number. My favorite articles/chapters are:
“Iñupiat Iḷitqusiat: An Indigenist Ethics Approach for Working with Marginalized Knowledges in Technical Communication” by Cana Uluak Itchuaqiyaq – which discusses using Indigenous knowledge to create methodologies to decolonize research with Indigenous, specifically Alaska Native, communities as well as considerations for how much community knowledge should be shared with outsiders.
“‘I’m surprised that this hasn’t happened before’: An Indigenous Examination of UXD Failure during the Hawai‘i Missile False Alarm” by Emily Legg and Adam Stranz – which talks about how the missile false alarm in Hawai’i and the proposed solutions fell short, because they didn’t take into account the larger scale issues brought up by the native Hawai’ians, including the historical context of why there’s a missile alert for Hawai’i in the first place (the answer is colonialism).
“The Tarot of Tech: Foretelling the Social Justice Impacts of Our Designs” by Sarah Beth Hopton – which presents the “Tarot of Tech,” an actual deck of tarot inspired cards with questions that probe into various project aspects as a method to interrogate the potential consequences or results of a project before you get to the implementation space. For example, how might bad actors use a design in ways you didn’t plan for. Very cool idea.
Bodies in Flux: Scientific Methods for Negotiating Medical Uncertainty by Christa Teston – A wee bit over my head vis a vis it’s focus on cancer care, but it has a fucking phenomenal methodological framework for looking at medical uncertainty, which I have plots about for trans reasons, though I haven’t yet had time to full finish the book. I was supposed to finish it for class, and did not, but I will eventually.
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So I think this is becoming a proper series, which is pretty darn cool. I realized, as my previous two articles about Jewish games started to make the Hanukkah season circuit, that I have once again found more Jewish tabletop games (and more) to talk about!
We’re gonna start by giving some updates about things I discussed in the previous years’ posts before diving into Exciting New(ish) Things™. Going all the way back to the original reason I wrote the very first post about Jewish tabletop games, Ritualwell launched not one, but two new sets of their Dreidel20s in 2023. The first is a multi-color set, expanding the original opaque white and blue/green set with opaque black and translucent red, green, and purple dice, and the second is the Dreidel4+20 set, which is two oversized D20s with tiny dreidels (D4s) suspended inside. They slap.
Secondly, I have landed on a place to get minis that I can make as Jewish as I please (with some limitations). It’s HeroForge! It’s not perfect, but the fact that I can put a headscarf on my ladies and can put a hannukiah on a mini base? Pretty great. I made a basic models for my Veil character Chava and then a full color model for my Vampire: The Masquerade character Wren.
I’m not 100% a fan of how chunky things can get on HeroForge, which is definitely something I have heard echoed by other people as well, but that is a tiny quibble when you think about how much HeroForge can do. Another thing that is generally hard to find vis a vis minis are disabled character figures, and HeroForge has you covered there too. They have disability aids you can give your figures, like wheelchairs, prosthetic limbs and crutches, which I love and they’re always adding more stuff. So much got added in the 10 months between my designing Chava and then coming back to design Wren.
So those are the updates on the previous articles, but what’s new new for 2023? A bunch of cool Jewish games from independent Jewish game designers is what.
If I Were a Lich, Man: 3 Jewish Games by Lucian Kahn – Lucian Kahn, who you might know from Visigoths vs Mall Goths or Dead Friend, launched a full trilogy of Jewish tabletop games in!
The titular game, If I Were a Lich, Man—a phenomenal pun on the Fiddler on the Roof song, “If I Were a Rich Man,”—is a game that says “Okay, Dungeons & Dragons says that liches have phylacteries, the English word for tefilin, making them Jewish-coded, let’s look at that.” Taking inspiration from the structure of the Passover seder, the game has you take on the roles of four liches who are debating strategies for survival for when the murderous lawful good paladins inevitably come after them. Tags[1]: Tense, Tragicomedy, D&D inspired, Dreidel-based system (could be substituted with a d4 with some conversion)
Same Bat Time, Same Bat Mitzvah – A guest at Ruthie’s bat mitzvah has been bitten by a vampire bat and is turning into a vampire. Just what every bat mitzvah needs. Ngl, if I’d had a bat mitzvah, I would have loved vampire shenanigans. Tags: Goofy, Card-based system
Grandma’s Drinking Song – You might recognize this one! It was one of the games in the Jewish ttrpg anthology Doikayt, which was on last years post. Inspired by stories of Lucian’s actual family, this game sees you craft a drinking song while roleplaying through various scenarios in the lives of a Jewish family of bootleggers during Prohibition. Tags: Happy, Melodramatic, Musical Comedy, Prompt-based system [1] These tone tags are taken from the descriptions on the If I Were a Lich, Man Kickstarter page.
Hanukkah Goblins by Max Fefer – So we know what happened to Herschel and the villagers in the Hanukkah classic, Herschel and the Hanukkah Goblins, and we know what happened to the Goblin King, but what about the rank and file goblins? I did always feel so bad for that fellow who got his hand stuck in the pickle jar. In Hanukkah Goblins, you play as those rank and file goblins who have been inspired by Herschel’s lessons about the values of Hanukkah and are now trying to convince your fellow goblins to join you in the Hanukkah spirit. Tags: Funny, Community, Supernatural, d6 system, GM optional
Esther and the Queens by Max Fefer and Norma Kaplan – A Purim-themed game, Esther and the Queens is a retelling of Book of Esther from a queer and feminist lens. You play as the handmaidens of Queen Esther who have infiltrated a party, on your queen’s orders, to liaise with the nobles and gain their support to help Queen Esther convince the King to overturn Haman’s decree to kill the Jews and save the community. Instead of simply rolling dice, the mechanics take the form of a variety of mini-games, which is really cool. It’s currently available for pre-order! Tags: Drama, Carnival, Mini Games, Dice Collection
Keeping the Lights On by Hekla Björk Unnardóttir – It is Hanukkah 2019/5780 and your community is fighting to keep your synagogue from closing. A short game designed to last for eight scenes, you create characters and then work your way through a series of prompts to try and save the synagogue all while trying to keep your characters from burning out. The play mechanics are a dreidel-system using matches in place of gelt. Tags: Community, Hanukkah, Drama, Dreidel-based system
Society of Rafa by Chickadee Tales, LLC – You are a healer in the village of Kahal and throughout the course of the game you will care for your patients and engage with the local spirits. Inspired by Jewish folklore as well as Ghibli films and other similar media, this is a community focused game rather than a sweeping adventure game. That said, this is still a full, robust ttprg, with the handbook providing four starter scenarios that could launch a campaign style of play. Tags: Community, Supernatural, Relationship Centric, d10-based system
Beyond the Pale by Yochai Gal – Inspired by Jewish folk tales and mysticism, Beyond the Pale is a horror adventure module designed for play with your chosen “old school” ttrpg system. Though the creator notes that Cairn was the system they had in mind during development, they consider the gamer pretty close to “system-neutral.” The setting is a shtetl in the Pale of Settlement in Russia and is deeply Jewish in its themes, while also being a proper old-school dungeon crawl. The Kickstarter just wrapped, but you can still pre-order the book before the campaign is fulfilled! Tags: OSR, Horror, Supernatural, Dungeon Crawl, system neutral
I’m super excited to play these (the ones that are actually out currently at any rate), because unfortunately for me, Hanukkah fell over finals weeks this year, so I was not thinking about games in the evenings, I was lighting candles and enjoying my eight days of tea and chocolate gift set to decompress after long days of doing nothing but writing, and then immediately returning to writing.
There will also be a part four to this series coming in January, because I ended up having to split my original piece into two parts for both length reasons and tonal shift reasons. Because the other half of my Jewish gaming experience in 2023 was a foray into the horror game series World of Darkness, which is, as the name might imply, quite dark. If that interests you, keep your eyes peeled and I’ll add a link here once it goes up.
Do you like tea? Do you like tiny dragons? What about tiny dragons that produce magical tea? Well do I have a book for you.
Before we meet the dragons, however, we have to meet Greta, a young goblin and blacksmithing apprentice, dedicated to her trade, but still floundering a bit. In a delicious bit of beautifully incorporated world building, we learn that blacksmithing isn’t the industry it once way, having been superseded in a number of areas by magic. Swords in particular aren’t used as much anymore societally, which has so many fantastic world building implications.
Greta’s journey into the world tea dragons begins when she rescues a small dragon being harassed by some feral dogs in the marketplace. After she brings the dragon home and gets it patched up, she is directed to the tea shop at the edge of town where its owner, Hesekiel, lives. Hesekiel and his partner Erik, are the last two members of the Tea Dragon Society, caretakers of tea dragons, which are small domestic dragons that grow a particular variety of tea from their horns. The dragon that Greta rescued was Jasmine, and through the story we also meet Chamomile and Roiboos. We also meet the other tea dragon caretakers, Erik, Hesekiel’s partner who is disabled and in a wheelchair, the caretaker of Roiboos and Minette, a new arrival to town who lost her memory through a mishap with her psychic abilities, who cares for Chamomile.
While there is some sadness in the background of the story, it is first and foremost a story gentle and cozy story of growth, finding comfort, and the importance of insuring that specialized knowledge are not lost. A key turning point for Greta is realizing that she is the only blacksmith apprentice in her town. And where another story might have a moment where the protagonist would have to choose between their two paths. The Tea Dragon Society asks, well why can’t you do both? Tea kettles, after all, are frequently made of iron. At the end, Greta becomes the caretaker of her own tea dragon, Ginseng, who has her own healing journey ahead of her.
The Tea Dragon Society had two companion books:
The Tea Dragon Festival – The story of Rinn, the niece of Erik, and her adventures not just with the tea dragon’s she’s familiar with but with a real full sized dragon.
The Tea Dragon Tapestry – It’s been one year since the events of The Tea Dragon Society and we check back in with Greta, Ginseng, and friends for a new story.
“Nob’s Tale” is a short comic where we get a little backstory for Prescott’s sumo wrestler boyfriend, Nobuyoshi “Nob” Yakamoto, from the main Some Strange Disturbances story. We learn about Nob’s family and see his encounter with a kappa as he attempts to get it to leave his village and let his family rest in peace. The story takes place in December 1845 during the events of the other collection of SSD short comic, “A Cold Winter’s Eve.”
“Nob’s Tale” is very short, only twelve pages, but it’s a great little short about a character who we’ve only gotten limited background information about in the main SSD story. After his mother and sister die in a tsunami, Nob’s grandmother tells him that there is a kappa who is preventing their spirits from resting peacefully. Nob’s subsequent confrontation with the kappa is framed somewhat like a folk tale—person challenges trickster to a game and the trickster is ultimately defeated through the person’s own fortitude/cleverness. The specifics here are, of course, focused around Japanese folklore and the kappa, but you don’t need to know much about kappas to enjoy the tale.
There is, in fact, fairly limited dialogue in the comic, letting the art speak for itself and lead the story, which I love. Particularly because James Dillenbeck’s art is so fantastic. The characters are all drawn in beautiful detail and the backgrounds are simple, but incredibly effective. I found myself particularly charmed by the kappa. The kappa as a character was sympathetic despite the fact that it was bothering the dead; it had been impacted by the tsunami too, washed inland and now was scavenging for food. This doesn’t mean that the kappa should stay there, but the kappa, as it points out, isn’t doing anything outside of its nature. Within that, I think the art really helps the kappa tread the line of sympathetic while also not letting us forget that kappas are known for their mischief.
On the note of art, I adore how Dillenbeck draws Nob. In the main story, we mostly see Nob in English dress, because he’s living in London, but here we see him in traditional Japanese dress as well as undressed for sumo wrestling. Sumo wrestlers are heavy, and Dillenbeck does such an incredible job portraying a fat body as beautiful and neutral. I bring up neutral because Nob’s body is neither shamed nor sexualized, which tend to be the “either or” positions that fat bodies are placed into. And while I personally find Nob attractive, this is not a story about Nob’s sexuality. It’s about his family.
Snap Book Reviews 