It Could Happen Here - CZM Book Club: The Clover Still Grows Wild in Wawanosh, by Kelly Rose Pflug-Back
Episode Date: February 22, 2026Margaret reads you a lush post-apocalyptic slice of life story by an amazing poetSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
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Over the last couple years, didn't we learn that the folding chair was invented by black people?
Because of what happened in Alabama?
This Black History Month, the podcast, Selective Ignorance with Mandy B,
unpacked black history and culture with comedy, clarity, and conversations that shake the status quo.
The Crown Act in New York was signed in July of 2019, and that is a bill that was passed to prohibit discrimination based on hairstyles associated with race.
To hear this and more.
Listen to Selective Ignorance with Mandy B
from the Black Effect Podcast Network
on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast,
or wherever you get your podcast.
I'm Bowen-Yin.
And I'm Matt Rogers.
During this season of the Two Guys' Five Rings podcast,
in the lead-up to the Milan-Cortina
2026 Winter Olympic Games,
we've been joined by some of our friends.
Hi, Brian, how Matt.
Hey, hello.
Hey, Matt, hey, Bowen.
Hi, Cookie.
Hi.
Now, the Winter Olympic Games are underway,
and we are in Italy
to give you experience.
from our hearts to your ears.
Listen to two guys, five rings on the Iheart radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
1969, Malcolm and Martin are gone.
America is in crisis.
At a Morehouse College, the students make their move.
These students, including a young Samuel L. Jackson,
locked up the members of the Board of Trustees,
including Martin Luther King's Senior.
It's the true story of protests and rebellion
in black American history that you'll never
forget. I'm Hans Charles.
I'm Minnick Lamumba.
Listen to the A-building on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall.
In 2018, the FBI took down a ring of spies working for China's Ministry of State Security,
one of the most mysterious intelligence agencies in the world.
The Sixth Bureau podcast is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition
and mistakes opened its fault of secrets.
Listen to the Sixth Bureau on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ballzone Media.
Book Club, book club, club, club, but club.
Hello, and welcome to Coolzone Media Book Club, the only book club where you don't have to do the reading because I do it for you.
I'm your host Margaret Kiljoy, and today I have a story for you.
I suppose I have a story for you every week, but this week,
I have a story for you.
It is luscious.
It is delicate.
It is complicated.
And it doesn't quite have a plot.
But Hazel and I both agree that it's honestly better for it in this particular story.
Do you trust us?
Do you trust us for a story like that?
Please trust us on this one.
This story is from a longtime collaborator of mine,
someone who I've worked with on projects here and there throughout the years,
because she's such an incredible writer.
Kelly Rose Flugback,
who was a writer and editor living in so-called Canada.
This story is also set in Canada,
in and around a community near Wawinosh,
which I looked up trying to find out how to pronounce
and listened to approximately eight different pronunciations,
and all of them were produced by a machine,
and I don't trust that pronunciation, so Wawinosh it is.
It's about three hours west of Toronto,
on Lake Huron. It appeared originally in Strange Horizons magazine in 2013. It's a real quote-unquote
classic book club story in that it is a story about climate and governance and sadness, but it's so
much more subtle and haunting than just saying it like that. It's a really good story. Do you trust us?
Please trust us on this one. It is a great story for the false spring. Probably about half of you
are experiencing what I'm experiencing, which is the false spring after the fall.
coldest winter in five to 20 years depending on where you are if you spend all your time
looking at charts of weather like I do anyway I can't really explain the story any better
because you should just listen to it maybe you'll listen to it while you take a pleasant but
unseasonably warm walk or you live out west and it's been unseasonably warm for a long time or you
live somewhere else in the world where I don't look at the maps of weather including the
country where this is set because I tend to only look at
the maps of weather in the United States. I don't feel proud of that. But now you all know
about my weather watching habits. And I feel like that's important. Please join me in reading.
Well, you all are going to listen. I'm going to do the reading. The Clover still grows wild in
Wawinosh by Kelly Rose Flagback. Dr. Hanson presses the cold bell of her stethoscope against my chest,
and I watch the lines in her face deepen.
It's dark in the room,
and the water marks in the ceiling's cracked plaster
look like continents,
like places I've never been
marked on a map I've seen once and forgotten.
It's daytime outside,
and the cold light of early spring
filters in pale and weak
through the newsprint she keeps taped over the windows.
Most people don't know this,
but Dr. Hansen is the kind of doctor that helps people
too. She used to work
in a hospital like other doctors and
wear a white coat and frown
over her patients like she frowns over
me now in a broken down
old house outside the city's
walls. When I talk
to her out loud, I call her Josepha
but in my head I still think of her
as Dr. Hansen, the way
I first heard it on the radio five years
ago. Her face is
different now than it was in the photographs.
Her nose is different
and so is the line of her jaw.
She says the pains in my chest might be from little growths called polyps.
She says that it isn't uncommon for kids born in the year of the worst chemical spills like me
when the poison gases left the forests outside of Wawainosh dead and leafless.
Since it happened, she says,
some of the biodegradable components of those chemicals have broken down and become harmless.
Others circulate through the water cycle,
coursing through rivers and clouds of condensation in the stratosphere,
gradually making their way to the north and south pole,
concentrated by the cold there.
She tells me it's the same as what happens
when you leave a bottle of beer outside in the snow in the winter
and forget it's there, and when you go out to get it,
all the pure alcohol has separated and risen to the top.
She gives me analgesic pills, an inhaler full of generic bronchodilator.
Dr. Hansen has people in.
inside the hospitals who give her things, even though they aren't supposed to.
She sits beside me on the edge of the narrow cot and lays her dry, cracked hand against my
cheek. The pads of her fingers are hard and smooth, silvery white with scar tissue. I touch my own
fingers sometimes and wonder how much it must have hurt. Dr. Hansen's eyes are blue, their edges
creased with fine lines. She tries to smile when she looks at me, but instead of the
her lips just pressed together.
I'm going to try to get you some better drugs, she says,
and she wraps her hand around mine and squeezes.
Jean-Marca accosts me before I'm even back to the compound,
walking up behind me on Paul silent feet,
so that I startle when he puts his hand on my shoulder.
I was in the city today, he tells me, and his smile is wolfish.
The day is bright and cold,
and his breath makes clouds of steam in the air,
his chest heaving like he's been running.
His hair has come loose from where he keeps it tied at the nape of his neck,
the short piece is hanging down in his face and greasy hanks.
I always tell him that next time one of the kids gets lice,
he's going to have to shave his head like everybody else,
teasing him with the woolling shears,
saying I'll chop it off while he's sleeping,
like that story I read in one of the Bibles we found in a crate at the dump site.
We'll see, he tells me, like he has any choice.
in it. I robbed a man, he grins, and I notice how he's hiding his hands behind his back.
I try to lean around him to see what he's got, but he darts and turns away from me, taking
another step backward. What is it? Something you'll want, he laughs, and he shows me a little
package wrapped in brown paper. Coffee? I try to grab it out of his hand, but he jumps out of my
reach again, and his hands go behind his back. Share, I tell him, taking another step forward,
and he laughs and tells me that sharing is conditional.
On what, I ask, still advancing as he retreats,
and he raises one of his eyebrows and his face becomes smug.
Does this condition apply to everybody who wants some, I ask,
and he shakes his head and says, no, just me.
I try to tackle him around the waist,
but he seems somehow heavier, more solid than last time we fought,
until it occurs to me that it's just me who's gotten weaker.
He tries to pin my arms behind my back, but I get myself free and run down the pothold road until he catches up.
Once, he would have pulled me to the ground, and we would have rolled around slinging dirt into each other's faces, laughing and choking on the dust, until one of us admitted reluctant to feet.
But this time, he lets his hands fall from my shoulders and then puts them back, a gesture of consolation this time rather than a challenge.
Mina, he says, and he puts the package in my hand
and closes my fingers around it.
We're still standing close to each other,
and he smells like stale sweat and stale tobacco and unwashed hair,
laced with some other smell I don't recognize,
some alien city smell, chemical and sharp.
We walk down the road together.
It's packed dirt flanked with ratty shrubs and Queen Anne's lace,
new green buds.
You are with the doctor?
Yes, I say, and I show him the painkillers in their little plastic bottle.
He nods and doesn't say anything else.
And do you know what else besides painkillers in a little plastic bottle
numbs the pain of the collapse of late capitalism?
The sweet, sweet deals that our advertisers are offering on these products and services.
Canadian women are looking for more.
More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are at them.
And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast.
I'm Jennifer Stewart.
And I'm Catherine Clark.
And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women.
Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey.
So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us.
Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on IHeartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Welcome to the A building.
I'm Hans Charles.
I'm Inelik Lamumba.
It's 1969.
Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.
had both been assassinated,
and Black America was out of breaking point.
Writing and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale.
In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's Almermata, Morehouse College,
the students had their own protest.
It featured two prominent figures in black history,
Martin Luther King's senior,
and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson.
To be in what we really thought was a revolution.
I mean, people would die.
the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone.
The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago.
This story is about protest.
It echoes in today's world far more than it should, and it will blow your mind.
Listen to the A-building on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
China's Ministry of State Security is one of the most mysterious and popular.
powerful spy agencies in the world.
But in 2017, the FBI got inside.
This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall.
This MSS officer has no idea the U.S. government is on to him.
But the FBI has his chats, texts, emails, even his personal diary.
Hear how they got it on the Sixth Bureau podcast.
I now have several terabytes of an MSS officer, no doubt, no question, of his life.
And that's the unicorn.
No one had ever seen anything like that.
It was unbelievable.
This is a story of the inner workings of the MSS
and how one man's ambition and mistakes
opened its fault of secrets.
Listen to the Sixth Bureau on the IHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Bowen-Yin-Yin.
And I'm Matt Rogers.
During this season of the Two Guys' Five Rings podcast
in the lead-up to the Milan Quartina
2026 Winter Olympic Games
we've been joined by some of our friends.
Hi, Boone! Hey, Elmo!
Hey, Matt, hey, Bowen.
Hi, Kierke.
Hi.
Now, the Winter Olympic Games are underway,
and we are in Italy
to give you experiences from our hearts
to your ears.
Listen to two guys, five rings
on the Iheart radio app,
Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
And we're back.
When Jean-Marc first showed up
in Illithel.
Theria, he was all lean muscle and bruised-colored eyes, a feral city thing. He had a kind of
violent sadness coming off of him, toxicity of constant fear. His face looks softer now,
even though he's older. From certain angles, you can almost see what he would have looked like
as a child if a place like the city would even allow a childhood for someone like him.
We walk all the way to the place where Illytheria's compound used to be, the wrecked carcass
of the old prison, with its big, ragged hole opening into what used to be the North Wing,
all jagged with twisted pieces of rebar and steel eye beams sticking out everywhere like teeth
and a mean, hungry mouth. I came to the prison alone last week, the day it rained all morning,
and the ruins smelled like wet concrete and wet ashes. I'm not sure what I was doing there.
I found a dead sparrow right in the bomb blast steel-toothed mouth,
lying with its wings spread on the ground.
Its neck lulled, limp in my cupped hands,
and I thought to myself,
there is softness in everything.
There is softness in the sunless world inside the old prison,
in the smell of old, old ashes
that comes back up out of the ground after it rains.
Some of those ashes are the burnt-up bones
of the men and women and little kids
who are trapped inside after the bombs,
and back when the compound was still at the ruins,
sometimes I would find little pieces of bone in the buckets of ash I brought out for the gardens.
Whenever that happened, I would keep them in my pocket and bring them up to the third hill after I was done,
the highest one where you can see into the junkyard and what used to be the highway.
I would dig little pits deep enough that the rain wouldn't wash them up
and say a few words to the bone pieces as I scraped the dirt back over them and packed it down.
Sometimes I would pull out some of my hair
Or make little cuts on my fingers
And squeeze drops of blood out
So they would know I hadn't forgotten why they died
Why the prison and all the places around it
Were empty for us to build our home in the first place
For days I would feel the little pinpricks on my hands
Where I'd cut myself
Whenever I was washing the dishes
Or cutting potatoes or chopping wood
The pain would remind me of the bone pieces
And the fire I was too young,
to remember. And there was softness in that as well. Jean-Marc and I stand beside each other in the
prison's jagged mouth, our hands not quite touching, looking into the dark. My eyes scanned the
ground for the sparrow's little body, but it's gone now, carried off by some animal. The flat field
behind us is still surrounded by a high, high fence, although there have been torn up bits for
as long as I remember. Some of the older people, like Sarah,
and James and Yehuda,
tell me that it was a yard
where they would let the prisoners exercise
way, way back when,
when the place was a normal prison.
After everything changed,
they never let anybody outside.
There are people in the city
who want to help us, Jean-Marx says,
still looking into the dark.
My face tenses up when he says it,
and he notices.
They're not rats, not this time.
I don't say anything.
My hand leaves my side,
and traverses the space between us, meaning to touch him,
although it stops short of contact and falls again, numb and heavy.
At the compound, there's an old mirror nailed into the door of the building
that used to be a barn, and I catch my own eyes reflected in it
as I'm closing the door behind us.
I look worse. I look the same.
Everyone can tell. No one can tell.
I'm imagining it.
I'm imagining everything.
Jean-Marc wrote a sign that says,
You're ugly and nailed it above the mirror
because he was sick of people looking at themselves.
I see it and smile as I latched the doors back shut again.
The children assail us before we've taken our boots off
and my smile widens at the small hand searching my pockets,
the laughing voices.
I close my hand around my bottle of painkillers
and Flora's tiny hot fingers try to pry it open again,
wanting to know what I have.
After the sun goes down, everyone goes outside where scrapwood from the dump site is already piled for the fire.
It will be summer soon, and there will be music and fire and laughing voices every night.
I leave without speaking and go up to the top floor of the third building where I sleep,
in a room which is really just one of the hall closets from back when the compound was a farm with a house made for three or four people, not 30.
In the dark, I think about Dr. Hansen.
Her soft, crackly voice telling me I should be more careful.
Her scarred up fingertips brushing the hair out of my face,
pinning it behind my ears.
I dream she lets me lay my head on her stomach while she combs my hair.
My mind drifts, pacified by the fantasy.
When I open my eyes, she is not her anymore.
She is dead, like the people on the propaganda leaflets that Jean-Marc showed me,
lurid photos showing the atrocities of the regime.
bloated faces, a woman's pregnant belly slid open like it's been unzipped.
Her intestines are laid in a slick membrane knot on her chest,
and you can see the baby inside, no longer protected by the cradle of her pelvic bones.
Layers of dissected tissue pinned and roached like paper roses,
flesh petals, curved bone.
I startle awake when Jean-Marc kicks open the door.
He shuts it again, as quietly as his panic will allow,
when darts into the corner beside where I'm lying.
Sh, he says, and I can hear things banging downstairs,
angry words being exchanged.
There's an edge of laughter in his voice,
and I know he's done something really stupid,
but part of him is proud of it.
The stairs creak with heavy footsteps,
but I can tell from the sound of the hard soul's shoes
that it's mason he's infuriated this time.
He's got a knife, says Jean-Marc, close to my ear.
I can tell by the way he's walking.
He's walking with confidence.
The footsteps thud past us.
Mason has been drinking.
He yells Jean Mark's name twice,
and then there's just silence.
Then a noise of frustration,
and he hurls something solid and heavy against the wall,
near where we're hiding.
Jean Mark's hand wraps around mine in the darkness.
But once Mason goes back downstairs again,
he breaks out into laughter.
He's been holding back the whole time.
His wine-smelling lips press against my cheek, and then he disappears again,
probably leaving through one of the upstairs windows that leads onto the roof.
In the morning, Yehuda looks exhausted, awake before everyone else,
peeling a mound of potatoes into one of the big plastic washtubs.
A pile of broken tinder that used to be one of the chairs lies gathered into a neat pile by the wood stove.
He smiles when he sees me, and I sit down beside him and take the,
the knife off my belt and start peeling, thinking that's the best way I can tell him I'm sorry.
Not for anything I've done wrong, just for the way things are in general. He doesn't say anything,
but I know he understands. Sometimes I think Yehuda is my father. Everyone takes care of the kids
together at Illytheria, feeds them and sews their clothes and teaches them how to mix bread dough
and plant tomato seedlings and feed the chickens. But sometimes Yehuda looks at me in a special way,
kind of sad and searching,
and I think he's trying to find pieces of my mother in my face.
Did you see the helicopter yesterday?
He asks eventually, and fear jabs its sharp beak into my chest.
No, I say, and I know what he's thinking,
that we have to leave soon,
that we have to go north to where there's still places to hide,
dragon mountains where helicopters can't land.
Brooms of dried nettles and mother warts sway from the ceiling rafters,
newly risen sun spilling in through the crack in the door that's been open to let the spring air in.
Home, the illusion of permanence.
James comes down the stairs with two of the kids, sad, dark-eyed Matthias asleep in his arms,
while Aretha straggles behind them, thin and rangy, her small-faced serious.
He eases himself onto the bench besides Yehuda, and they sit with their knees touching.
Yehuda puts his arms around James and Matthias, and they stay like,
that for a while with their eyes closed.
Makes me sad for some reason,
and I try not to look.
Mina, what do you think we can do for Jean-Marc? James asks me.
I look at the potato I'm peeling and shrug my shoulders at him.
Four? Don't you mean about?
They both laugh, although they try not to.
He's not here, and nobody knows where he's gone.
Please, Mina, you seem to know him better than anyone else does.
I do know Jean-Marc better than anyone else does. I do know Jean-Marc better than anyone.
else I want to tell him, and that's the reason I really don't care what happens to him.
He'll be back, I tell them instead. He doesn't know how to take care of himself out here where there
aren't any rich people to rob. Ritha pulls at my sleeve and frowns. She wants us to stop talking about it.
I'm sorry, Ritha, we won't fight, I say, and I wrap my arm around her narrow shoulders and pull her
onto the bench beside me. And do you know what else is always beside you on the bench?
just right there, ready to put a supportive arm around your shoulders.
Like an old friend.
That's right.
It's the ads.
Canadian women are looking for more.
More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them.
And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast.
I'm Jennifer Stewart.
And I'm Catherine Clark.
And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women.
Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and new.
all at different stages of their journey.
So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us.
Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on I Heart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Welcome to the A building.
I'm Hans Charles.
I'm Inalek Lamuba.
It's 1969.
Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.
have both been assassinated.
And Black America was out of breaking point.
Writing and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale.
In Atlanta, Georgia at Martin's Almemada, More House College.
The students had their own protest.
It featured two prominent figures in black history,
Martin Luther King Sr., and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson.
To be in what we really thought was a revolution.
I mean, people would die.
1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone.
The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago.
This story is about protest.
It echoes in today's world.
world far more than it should, and it will blow your mind.
Listen to the A-building on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
China's Ministry of State Security is one of the most mysterious and powerful spy agencies in the world.
But in 2017, the FBI got inside.
This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall.
This MSS officer has no idea the U.S. government has no idea the U.S. government has.
on to him. But the FBI has his chats, texts, emails, even his personal diary. Here how they got it
on the Sixth Bureau podcast. I now have several terabytes of an MSS officer, no doubt, no question,
of his life. And that's the unicorn. No one had ever seen anything like that. It was unbelievable.
This is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes
opened its vault of secrets.
Listen to the sixth bureau on the I-heart radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Bowen-Yin.
And I'm Matt Rogers.
During this season of the Two Guys' Five Rings podcast,
in the lead-up to the Milan Cortina-26 Winter Olympic Games,
we've been joined by some of our friends.
Hi, Bob, hi, hi, Matt.
Hey, Elmo.
Hey, Matt, hey, Bowen.
Hi, Cookie.
Hi.
Now, the Winter Olympic Games,
are underway, and we are in Italy to give you experiences from our hearts to your ears.
Listen to Two Guys Five Rings on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your
podcast.
And we're back.
I know I shouldn't do it, but I go to Dr. Hanson anyway.
After the sun's gone down and my work for the day is done.
The way there is mostly through the forest, so I tell myself the helicopters wouldn't be able
to see me anyhow.
If they knew how to see into the forest, they wouldn't do.
have to drop the bombs filled with poison gas that strips every tree to its bare white skeleton.
If they knew how to see into the forest, they wouldn't have to chop it all down and burn the stumps.
The way there is long, but I push my aching body.
When I get to her house, there isn't any light, but she's lying awake inside with her eyes open,
just looking out into the dark.
You have to leave soon, she says when I crawl into bed beside her.
I have to leave too.
She puts her arm around my shoulders,
and I tell her the same thing I've told her so many times.
But I love her, that I'm in love with her,
that I want to kiss her on her mouth
and on the scarred over tips of each of her fingers,
that I wish, more than anything,
I could take the pain out of her memories
and out of her tired, broken body.
I love you as well, Mina, she says,
and kisses the side of my head.
I know she doesn't mean it the way that I mean it,
And I tell myself that's almost better.
That's the way it should be between us.
We don't say anything for a while, and I wonder for a moment if she's gone to sleep.
I curl myself around her thin body and lay my head on her shoulder.
In my pocket, I can feel the packet of coffee that Jean-Marc gave me.
A heavy wind shakes the house, making its wooden rafter sigh,
and it's then that I know I will never see Jean-Marc again.
He has been killed, or else cross the house.
some other boundary, just as unbroachable as death,
lost again in the bowels of the city where he came from.
Do you think any of the forests have grown back? I ask her.
The forests all around Wawinosh?
It won't ever be like it was before, she says after a minute,
her voice ruffling my hair as it drifts into sleep.
But some things are hearty and don't die like the rest.
Clover, I think.
I think the clover still grows wild in Wawinosh.
The clover still grows wild, I repeat to myself,
and I close my eyes listening to the sound of our breath
and the rattling in my chest
and the noises of the first birds waking up outside
as the gray morning light weeps in through the windows
through all the small spaces where the tape has peeled away.
The end.
And yeah, I don't know, welcome back.
What a lush, delectable story.
Thank you, Kelly.
and I can just feel the fog through the prose.
Kelly just has a real serious way with words.
Hazel, who helps us pick the stories,
has this to say about this story.
Quote,
I am just so taken with the imagery and the emotions that Kelly evokes.
This story makes me feel very similarly
to when I read Parable The Sower for the first time,
which, listener, if you haven't read yet, is a must read.
Being presented with different coping strategies
for catastrophe and impending doom.
Mina seeking out doomed romance,
Jean-Marx starting shit,
Yehuda losing himself in work,
is a classic setup for this kind of story,
but the texture and vibrance and subtlety
that Kelly brings is true craft.
And she writes with this prose
that you can really chew on
and keep finding depth, turning over a new layer.
At the beginning, we called out
that this piece wasn't going to have too much plot,
and it doesn't, but it frankly doesn't need one.
Plot is often the engine driving a story,
but for Clover, the images dripping in emotional resonance are so strong that they power the story all on their own.
The final image of looking at the sunlight coming in through the holes in the window where the tape is peeling away
sums up so perfectly the tensions of this story.
Illytheria, the utopian community, which is also the Greek word for freedom,
is the sunlight coming in through the holes, carving out autonomy outside where the state can project its power.
And Illythuria is also the tape, trying to keep everyone together.
to survive collectively.
This is the endless tension of finding autonomy,
but beyond that,
what does it even mean to be free
if you know that your world will be ending
slash ended by force by the empire?
What does freedom mean to a doomed revolutionary?
And that's what Hazel has to say about it,
and I agree with that.
And one of the things that really struck me about this story,
usually if you have your little community called freedom
at the edge of an empire and it's dystopian,
and you can't quite tell the age of the characters,
but you get the impression that they're like older teens, maybe, you know?
You're expecting a certain kind of Y-A niceness to that community.
If people disagree with each other, it's like goofy or bullying, you know?
But in this story, you have a drunken bad kid
who's made someone so mad that he's stalking around the house with a knife.
you know there's like a realness a rawness to this utopian community that i'm really impressed with
and it really shows that kelly has experienced the less gentle sides of life and society at various
points in her life and it it really comes across and i really like that paired with this like
you know cool anarchyish community outside of society having it be like
like, no, shit's like rough and real, but they're also like,
care about the kids and take care of each other and all that shit.
I would read a whole novel said in this,
but I agree that it works like this.
It works as this vignette with a lot of things that it leaves us to think about.
It just, it asks more questions than it answers,
and while I both appreciate that, I'm also like, I could read more.
Anyway, Kelly's bio.
Kelly Rose Flugback is a writer, editor, and weightlifting coach living in Toronto.
They recently edited the anthology U.P.C.U.P.C.Rising.
And have otherwise been busy opening an accessible queer gym space, which you can find at
Spectrum Collective.ca.c.a. You can also follow her at Kelly Rose Creates
and at less pain underscore more gains.
Yeah, and I'm Margaret Kiljoy,
and you can find me on Instagram and Blue Sky,
and Hazel helps with research in the scripts,
and Eva does the audio editing,
and I hope you too get to chop a mountain of potatoes this week,
and that it's cathartic for you as well.
Until next week, see you soon.
Fuck ice.
Bye, everyone.
It could happen here as a production of Cool Zone Media.
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visit our website, Coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can find sources where it could happen here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources.
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