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ELECTRIC ICE
Jack, a 200-year-old intersex street kid, has lived countless lives, and he remembers them all. He remembers our world and the massive tidal wave that erased it and everyone he knew. He’s been ridden by the trickster god Coyote across the country. He’s seen a world blanketed in never-ending ice, and he’s witnessed the Great Garbage Ocean spew plastic and jellyfish onto its shores.
Yet Jack also remembers love. As he grapples with the curse of survival while humanity teeters on the brink of extinction, he remembers the found family he connected with when trekking across frozen lakes and over roaring waterfalls to reach the salt sea. He remembers the university researchers, Charlie and Leo, who loved him and the town’s other orphans as much as they did each other. And he tells these memories to Joon, his great love – another ageless “Warehouse kid” whose identity is as unique and undefinable as Jack’s.
A post-apocalyptic, post-gender series, JELLYFISH DREAMING and its prequel, ELECTRIC ICE, pulse with plot twists, fierce determination, and unrelenting hope, navigating our own unrecognizable world with messages of love and survival in all its forms.
— Common Press Books
THE 3 READERS:
D.K. McCUTCHEN’s Speculative Fiction trilogy includes: JELLYFISH DREAMING, a Leapfrog Press Global Fiction Prize winner; ELECTRIC ICE forthcoming (2024) winner of a Speculative Literature Foundation grant; & PLASTIC EATERS forthcoming (2025). WHALE ROAD, creative nonfiction about sailing with whale researchers through the South Pacific was a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book and Pushcart Nominee, published in NZ & the UK with an update by JackLeg Press, US (2023). D.K. teaches writing for College of Natural Sciences, UMass Amherst, and is an Associate Director of the Junior Year Writing Program.
KIRSTEN MOSHER is a visual artist and writer living in Buckland, MA. Her flash-book Zero (minutes to) Home was published by Selektion (Frankfurt, 2021), and her chapbook Plea$e Steal Me for 100 Plus Dollar-zz has been recently published by Lily Poetry Review Books. She’s published in Ellipsis Zine, the Bath Flash Fiction Anthology, The Cormorant Broadsheet and Sonder Magazine, and forthcoming in Exacting Clam. Her series Automotive Stories occasionally show up in the Automotive sections of local newspaper like the Greenfield Recorder. She’s currently working toward an exhibit at Frac Pay-de-La-Loire in Southern France, opening November 2024.
CINDY SNOW published her chapbook Small Ceremonies with Slate Roof press. She’s published in the Massachusetts Review, Peace Review, Worcester Review, Crannóg, and elsewhere. Her poetry was nominated for a Pushcart, won the Poet’s Seat Poetry Contest, and was awarded honorable mentions from Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry, 2017, and the Patricia Dobler Award, 2016. Cindy served as a Platte Clove Artist in Residence and was a writing fellow at Cill Rialaig, Ireland. At The Changing Nature of Art & Science Conference, 2017, Amsterdam, Cindy read from her manuscript on the 17th Century naturalist & botanist Maria Sibylla Merian. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Drew University and lives in Shelburne Falls, MA, with her family.
3 READERS video at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Lederle Science & Engineering Library
It went well!
Such lovely people in the audience! Man, I wish I’d taken a pic of them.
A friend (Sylvia!) brought me an article on Jellyfish Dreaming in the Daily Hampshire Gazette I never would have seen otherwise:
Book Bag: ‘Jellyfish Dreaming’ by D.K. McCutchen; ‘Open Fire’ by Deborah Gorlin and ‘Memphis Shoals’ by Brad Crenshaw; ‘The Last language’ by Jennifer duBois
Staff Writer
Published: 10/13/2023 1:47:18 PM
Modified: 10/13/2023 1:46:11 PM
Jellyfish Dreaming
By D.K. McCutchen
Leapfrog Press
One reviewer calls its “a head trip like nothing you’ve read,” a story that weaves together many issues percolating today — climate change, genetics, gender, biology — “in such a way it’s impossible to miss how they were always all one thing to begin with.”
“Jellyfish Dreaming,” by D.K. McCutchen, is a post-apocalyptic, speculative novel that on one hand envisions a future world of seemingly unmitigated horror. For one thing, the oceans now “cough up jellyfish and plastic rubbish” and little else, and the human race — what’s left of it — subsists largely on a diet of jellyfish and kelp.
In fact, humans are starting to turn into jellyfish themselves — and they’ve become sterile.
Then’s there’s Jack, the central character of the novel, is a “200-year-old intersex street kid” who has a strange form of immortality, in which he changes back into a kid every time he reaches the cusp of adulthood.
Jack still has memories of things, like birds and frogs, that existed before environmental disasters destroyed the old world. That and the fact that he’s not sterile attracts the interest of some nearby university researchers, who believe Jack and some other orphaned survivors might be humanity’s last hope.
Love is still a part of life. But when Jack falls for Joon, one of the tough street kids who can choose their own gender, old bigotries erupt into violence, and Jack must scramble to protect those he loves from a madman and save a dying world. But at what cost?
D.K. McCutchen teaches writing for students in the University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Natural Sciences, and she’s also an associate director of the Junior Year Writing Program. She’s a UMass graduate as well.
McCutchen will come to Broadside Bookshop in Northampton on Oct. 17 at 7 p.m. to talk about the U.S. edition of her nonfiction book, “The Whale,” a narrative first published in New Zealand that recounts the author’s experience on a scientific expedition from Tahiti to New Zealand.
Published for the first time in the USA, October 17th, with JACKLEG PRESS
“Spellbinding. Enormously rich and satisfying.”
– Witi Ihimaera, The Whale Rider
ON THE WHALE ROAD, a sailing vessel and her small research crew follow the Hwaelweg –the path of the whale– through the South Pacific to New Zealand to see if any whales are left at all. Based on a true tale of the voyage, WHALE ROAD embraces magical realism in a story told to an unborn child, in which a sailor falls off a cliff and turns into an albatross and a pod of female sperm whales chase the setting sun.
CHAPTER 1: ALL ABOUT JACK
R.E.M.- It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)
CHAPTER 2: OTHER PEOPLE’S MEMORIES
CHAPTER 5: MADGIRL BLOWS IT
When The Levee Breaks feat. John Paul Jones | Playing For Change |
EPILOGUE
I am the Walrus (Remastered 2009) – The Beatles
In Conversation with Kirsten Mosher & Cindy Snow:
KIRSTEN MOSHER is a visual artist and writer. She has exhibited internationally, and her chapbook Plea$e Steal Me for 100 Plus Dollar-zz is forthcoming with Lily Poetry Review Books in October, 2023.
CINDY SNOW published her chapbook Small Ceremonies with Slate Roof press. At The Changing Nature of Art & Science Conference, in Amsterdam, Cindy read from her manuscript on the 17th Century naturalist & botanist Maria Sibylla Merian.
(so far!)
JELLYFISH DREAMING (JFD) winner of a LeapFrog Global Fiction Prize for YA, is forthcoming August 22, 2023, with LEAPFROG Press (USA) and CAN OF WORMS Press (UK).
WHALE ROAD is updated & forthcoming in the USA for the first time with JACKLEG Press, October 16th, 2023 (previously published by Random House NZ, 2004, and Blake UK 2006).
Western Massachusetts READINGS:
• ARMS LIBRARY, Shelburne Falls, MA, Saturday July 29th , 2023 (7:00 pm)
• STRAW DOG WRITER’S GUILD as Featured Author at: FORBES LIBRARY, Northampton, MA, August 1st, 2023 (6:00-8:00pm)
• ODYSSEY BOOKS, South Hadley, MA, Aug 22, 2023 (7:00 pm)
• BROADSIDE BOOKS, Northampton, October 17th, 2023 (7:00 – 8:00pm)
• LAVA CENTER, Third Tuesday Featured Author, Greenfield, MA, Dec. 19th 2023 (7:00 pm)
Other readings TBD.
