A Corvid Kind of Kinship

By Rhonda Parrish.

Corvidae is out this week, and I’m am super stoked but also definitely feeling the pressure, dudes.

Corvidae is full of speculative fiction stories about, you guessed it, corvids. I freaking adore corvids. I’ve always felt a kind of kinship with them—I even have a murder of crows as a tattoo. Working on this anthology I wanted to do justice to the topic, not just how people have felt about these creatures since ancient times but also the birds themselves. I wanted stories that captured their intelligence, capriciousness and beauty and, despite my own personal bias toward magpie stories, I also wanted as wide a range of corvids as possible. I put a lot of pressure on myself.

This anthology, for anyone who doesn’t know, is the second in the series Rhonda Parrish’s Magical Menageries.

Read that series title again.

Rhonda Parrish’s Magical Menageries.

Rhonda Parrish’s.

Me. My name. Right there in the series title. It’s not just on the cover of the book, it’s there in the name of series. Holy cheeseballs, Batman!

But wait, there’s more!

The first book in Rhonda Parrish’s Magical Menageries(!) was Fae. People love Fae. I love it, the contributors love it, reviewers love it, readers love it. People. Love. Fae. The same people who read and loved Fae are likely to read Corvidae and I want them to love it just as much. Or more. The words ‘Sophomore Slump’ rarely left my mind the whole time I was working on Corvidae because above all else I want not to disappoint.

Now it’s time to share the results with the world and so I’m feeling the pressure. But it’s a weird kind of pressure, one that is combined with excitement, pride and optimism. Because this is a great anthology.

Everyone who is involved with it has worked really hard to make sure it is something special. I even asked a corvid (in the form of @YegMagpie) to look it over and make sure it was super shiny. In fact, he wrote cawmentaries to go with each story which you can read here.

From the Great War to far-away planets and everywhere in between, these stories and poems feature jays, magpies, crows, ravens, choughs, and rooks; they spotlight corvid intelligence, playfulness, and self-awareness while also exploring their darkness and their light.

So if you like corvids, if you like speculative fiction and especially if you liked Fae, you are going to love Corvidae. But until I hear it from you—the readers—directly I’m still going to feel that pressure. And maybe that’s okay.

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Editor Rhonda Parrish is a master procrastinator and nap connoisseur but despite that she somehow manages a full professional life. She has been the publisher and editor-in-chief of Niteblade Magazine for over five years now (which is like 25 years in internet time) and is the editor of the benefit anthology Metastasis, as well as the World Weaver Press anthologies Fae, Scarecrow, and Corvidae. In addition, Rhonda is a writer whose work has been included or is forthcoming in dozens of publications including Tesseracts 17: Speculating Canada from Coast to Coast and Imaginarium: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing. Her website, updated weekly, is at rhondaparrish.com.

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