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My writers critique group here in Chicago recently released an anthology, Over the Edge Again: An Edgy Writers Anthology.

Samuel Durr, who also edited the anthology, used his experience as a hunter to explore the relationship between two people who didn’t seek each other’s companionship in his story, “Wild Heart.” In this essay, he shares the best part of hunting.

Forest to Table

By Samuel Durr

Scouting, hiking, climbing, freezing, spotting, calling, shooting, tracking, celebrating, gutting, dragging, hoisting, skinning, quartering, grinding, butchering, packaging, and finally, cooking, sharing, and enjoying. Deer hunting is hungry work, but the part that makes me consider buying a lifetime license is the last bit. Preparing meat harvested from the forest takes an enormous amount of time, money, and energy, but is worth the cold toes.

The first time I tried deer meat I was struck by its similarity to beef. Cue the eye rolls, but it’s true. The less desirable cuts on a cow, those which contain connective tissue like the shoulder and neck, are identical to the same cuts on a deer and can be used to substitute any beef recipe traditionally utilizing those cuts. Which is a long way of saying venison is fantastic for jerky, braised dishes like Italian beef, ossobuco, or beef stew. One of the great myths of deer meat is that it’s tough, but it’s only tough if it’s cooked inappropriately.

In truth, the sought-after cuts, those from the back legs, the back straps, and the tender loins, cannot compete. That’s because a cow has a great deal more fat between layers of muscle. That’s not to say these are terrible on a deer. They can be juicy and almost fork tender; wrap them in bacon and grill them if there’s any doubt, but consider that they’ve been taken from a lean athlete who’s been hounded by coyotes, fought for breeding rights, and slept under the stars. Not from a diabetic heifer who’s been so unnaturally bred it chews its own stomach contents like bubble gum.

Another, often-disdained, form of venison is ground venison. Just like the quality cuts on a cow, high quality ground beef is hard to beat, but that’s not to say ground venison doesn’t have a place at the dinner table. This stuff is fantastic and incredibly versatile. On a side note, if an outdoorsman says they have a lot of freezer-burned, six-year-old ground venison, it’s because they don’t cook as much as they should and will probably end up tossing it. I get offended by hunters who don’t cook in the same way that animal rights activists get offended by hunters. Point being, it’s a tragedy because this stuff is great for chili, tacos, and is a crucial ingredient for the best food harvested from these mystical forest creatures: sausage.

Sausage is the ultimate, the apex, the pinnacle. Good sausage is the most impressive stuff a hunter can prepare. If you hand someone a well-made sausage, regardless of whether they hunt or not, they will be impressed if they’re at least a skosh outdoorsy. But sausage also requires the greatest number of tools to get the job done right. A competitive sausager — my fancy, made-up term — may use a grinder, meat thermometer, stuffer, and a smoker just to make one kind of sausage. Last year, I spent close to fifteen hours making breakfast sausage, brats, Italian sausage, summer sausage, snack sticks, and Polish sausage, all from venison. Most of it was good, some of it great, some just so-so, but all worthy as a meal.

I’ve included a recipe for venison Italian beef which highlights the above-mentioned deer and beef similarities. It requires a slow cooker and access to venison, moose, or elk, but that’s it. Easy peasy. If it’s your first time trying wild game, it’s a great introduction to the part of hunting that, for millions of years, has always mattered most: the eating.

Easy Italian Beef (Venison) Recipe

READY: 3 to 5 hours

SERVES: 6 to 12

INGREDIENTS

2-3                   lbs venison roast

3                      beef bouillon cubes

1                      (5/8 oz) packet Italian salad dressing mix

1                      cup water

1                      (18 oz) jar of hot or mild giardiniera

1                      package of French rolls

Directions

1. Place roast in crock pot.

• Add Italian salad dressing mix, bouillon cubes and water.

• Cook on high until tender (3 to 5 hours). Shred with forks. Serve on rolls with giardiniera.

My latest novel, Immunity Index, has a woolly mammoth in it. I don’t think this product, for sale at the Time Travel Mart, is for real, but I would buy a dozen cans if it were.

SF² Concatenation, a British on-line magazine, asked me to write an article about “Getting published: From draft manuscript to print.” I wrote about my most recent novel, Immunity Index.

I tell about mistakes I made, misadventures I didn’t expect, and something I decided to never ever do again.

Read the article here: http://www.concatenation.org/articles/burke-sue-getting-published.html

“IN MEMORIAL: This plaque commemorates an oak tree that graced this site for forty years. It was felled by the bureaucracy in December 1990 to make space for one more car.”

This is a real plaque at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, located at the carpark  between the Wai-te-ata Apartments and the Boyd Wilson clubrooms. I haven’t been able to learn much more, besides that it was put up anonymously, and that rogue plaques are sort of a thing in New Zealand.

I believe this sort of thing should be encouraged worldwide.

Dinosaurs lived on the far side of the galaxy. That is, the Sun orbits around the galaxy’s center, and it’s a long trip, about 250 million years. Dinosaurs — in particular, the big Jurassic critters like tyrannosaurs — lived about 166 to 66 million years ago, so they lived in a different neighborhood of the galaxy.

Here’s the cool part. Because the stars move around in relationship to each other as well as in their orbits, the neighboring stars are different over time. In that way, space travel is possible to distant stars if the travelers are patient and have generation ships (presuming these creatures have generations like human beings). They can hop from star to star, sometimes pausing to rest, and meanwhile the stars will take them to new parts of the galaxy.

So, it just might be vaguely possible that Earth was visited over on the far side of the galaxy by slow travelers, and they took Earth faunae with them as they continued on, bringing them to new homes. Dinosaurs in space! Land of the Lost without a dimensional portal!

Or perhaps they took a different Jurassic lineage, and there’s a Planet of the Turtles out there somewhere.

Kill your darlings, they say. That means you should cut the parts from your book that don’t move the plot forward, even if you love them. So, on the wise advice from my editor, I killed the final section of the novel Interference about some fippokats (well, they were going to die anyway) and write a different ending that was much more dire.

Here’s the original ending for your enjoyment: the alternate epilogue to Interference.

EPILOGUE—KELLY—LATER THAT DAY—IN ORBIT

Oh, this is the strangest place and the most wonderful. It frightened me at first, yes, although the Big Ones are happy, so we are happy, Moss and Emerald and Lime and I am Kelly. We have our sleeping box and we drink water from a tiny pipe next to strange food dishes and it is a game just to eat because the food floats. It all floats, the Big Ones and the food and the toys and us and everything.

But we do more than float, Moss and Emerald and Lime and I. We jump and hop and chase each other, leaping from wall to wall, from floor to ceiling, anyplace to anyplace, and look at this somersault, three in a row! We can fly!

We hop and we glide along the walls and ceilings and floors and tabletops, and it is easy, a twitch of the toes and now a somersault again. Here I come at a Big One, and I spread my legs to steer and slow, and the Big One catches me and says Kelly Kelly Kelly and pets me and we float to the window to look outside, but it is night, so I will stay where it is bright and warm and full of fun.

The Big One helps me spin, whee! and I come to a wall and jump off because Lime is down the hall and we can chase each other through the air. Lime sees me and launches herself at me and we meet in the air and bat at each other’s back feet and we connect and here we go! Back and forth and up and down, wall to floor to ceiling. It is the best game ever.

We can fly! We can fly!

Meet Me In Another Life by Catriona Silvey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Science fiction can reach out to the stars and at the same time hold tight to the human heart. The many layers of mystery in this beautiful love story lead to a breathtaking ending.

First, I should say that the British publisher sent me a copy of this novel and asked me to provide a blurb if I liked it. I did like it, and my blurb is the first paragraph of this review. The British edition goes on sale July 8. If you’re in the US, the book has been on sale since April.

Second, I cried at the ending.

Third, I won’t tell you why. Because spoilers, big spoilers.

Fourth, if you like science fiction, as you read this novel, you may wonder at some point if it is science fiction. Thora and Santi keep meeting in life after life, which doesn’t seem to make much sense. Trust me. It really is science fiction, and it all makes sense in the end.

Fifth, if you like literary fiction, here’s your chance to see that science fiction can also be character-driven and utterly moving. Just like the past and the present, the future will be human and humane.


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The genus of plants called Dracaena gets its name from the Ancient Greek word δράκαινα (drakaina): “female dragon.” It got that name because the red sap of Dracaena draco looked like dragon blood to the ancients. Dragon blood, it turns out, is useful.

Many houseplants fall within the Dracaena genus. Always popular for its beauty and easy care is the Dracaena marginata, also called the Madagascar dragon tree. One variety has dark red outer edges on its leaves with a green center; the Tricolor has green, pinkish, and yellowish stripes; and the Colorama has wide red edges.

None of them are real dragons, of course. But … what if they were dragons … dragons that were hiding? Dragons are magic, so they certainly could take the shape of a plant. And what if, sometimes, in the middle of the night, they changed back into real dragons?

You’ve never seen that happen — and there might be a magical reason for that. When you see a dragon in your living room, the dragon uses its magic to gently and thoroughly remove that memory from your mind. But a dragon has a sense of justice, and it wants to reward you for your care of the plant. So it offers a deal: it will remove the memory of its true self, and, if you wish, it will also remove one additional memory of your choice. There must be something you wish you could forget.

What would you choose?

“Going to the woods is going home.” — John Muir

Photo: Eau Claire Dells County Park, near Wausau, Wisconsin. Photo by Sue Burke.