Review of ‘Glittership, Spring 2020’

I don’t usually review magazines but I had the opportunity to take a look at this one and I’m really happy I got to discover it. GlitterShip is a queer online magazine of science-fiction and fantasy. There is also an audio version, as podcasts, so if you’d rather listen than read, you have a choice (but you’ll have to wait a little before these new stories make it to the podcast). Isn’t that cool?

The issue I’m reviewing is the Spring 2020 issue (available here) and includes three original short stories, three original poems and three more stories that you may have already read before. While I have my favourites, I enjoyed them all.

It so happens that the one I liked best is the first one, All the Daughters of My Father’s House by Gwen C. Katz. It has an Orlando feel (Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, not Florida’s) I loved, not only in its gender fluidity aspect, in the atmosphere too. I guess I should mention Shakespeare here as well. Speaking of Shakespeare, Thou Shalt Be Free As Mountain Winds by Jennifer Mace, about featherwitches and pirates, is beautifully written and will stick in my memory, I think, as will Benjamin Rosenbaum’s The Frog Comrade, which caught me completely off-guard.

But really, all are worth reading. And as someone who tends to run the other way when poetry is mentioned, I’m glad poems were interspersed between stories, they acted as palate cleansers.

If you want to know more about the magazine and how it came to exist, here’s an interesting interview with Keffy R. M. Kehrli, the creator and editor of GlitterShip.