All Along the Pacific with C.B. Calsing

Hello dear reader, dear friends and fans. I know it has been a week since we last got together but I have had some, shall we say, difficult days in the last week or so. However I have been working diligently on your behalf, never the less. This week I want to take a short break from An Honest Lie Volume 2: Delusions of Insignificance to bring you something else we’ve been working on. You can still vote for your favorite author from An Honest Lie Volume 2: Delusions of Insignificance here and you can pick up your copy here.

In An Honest Lie Volume 1: Encouraging the Delinquency of your Inner Child we were treated to a haunting tale called “Gran’s Prophecy“ about horticultural prophecy and the birth of kings. In An Honest Lie Volume 2: Delusions of Insignificance we were treated to a darker story called “Martina Gets the Last Word “ about true love and it’s eternal depths. Both of these great stories were brought to us by one of my new favorite writers C.B. Calsing. Now she returns to us with an anthology of her own called All Along the Pacific. This is a collection of 10 stories set in and around San Louis Obispo. Spanning the years from 1835 until 2005 each story not only carries us into these time periods, but also does a wonderful job of ting the lives, families and cultures of the age together giving us a picture of our American history. But more about that later, first let’s meet Corina B. Calsing.

Hailing originally from San Louis Obispo, California C.B. Calsing now lives in and writes from New Orleans, Louisiana. Her passion for The Big O is only surpassed by her love for writing, cocktails N.O. sports teams’ architecture and really good food, all of which are in grand abundance in her adopted home city. Her creative drive was encouraged by parents who were themselves “hard-working free spirits”. “My mother would draw children’s books just for me, and as I got older, the three of us would collaborate on projects: writing, drawing, binding. By second grade I had started writing with a goal for publication,” she told us. By the second grade she’d already established the goal of writing for publication. Her first effort was a musical play about two rival break dancing gangs which she cast with her class mates, none of which auditioned. Maybe that’s what drove her to her current profession, teaching middle school kids the dastardly craft.

Like the rest of us writers she often thinks of her chosen passion as entertaining though others often see it differently.

“Writing was entertainment for me. I did short stories, movie scripts, and novellas. A compulsion, some might say. An addiction others would call it. After all, it does interfere with my relationships and work, sometimes.”

But even so writing is a passion that cannot be ignored. She got lucky following Richard Fords advice in his “Ten Rules for Writing Fiction” when he said, “Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer’s a good idea.” She has a very give and take relationship with her loving husband who supports her efforts, even bringing her dinner to the writing table and accepting responsibility for overlooking editorial mistakes prior to submission. But she gives him credit saying, “I don’t think I’d have accomplished as much as I have in the last decade if he wasn’t with me. A lot of my ideas develop with his input too. We spend a lot of time discussing “what if,” and if I get stuck on an ending, he always has the best solution.”

Her major turning point came in 2004 when she had a bad experience working with an alternative middle school for students that had been expelled from their neighborhood schools. Without the gory details, she quit and found herself with an opportunity to write full time. In that time productivity was an understatement. Corina finished two novellas, both of which are still “in the box” so to speak, and several shorts. Realizing she needed to move forward with her Masters of Fine Arts she applied with the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans who accepted her by 2006. This was when she got serious about her writing, more serious than ever before anyway.

“During those workshop classes, I first conceived of the short stories that would eventually make up All Along the Pacific. Part of this came from a general dislike of contemporary, realistic fiction.”

“My writing heroes — Marquez, Steinbeck, Lovecraft, Dick, Gaiman, Mieville (you’ll notice no women there, and probably fault me for it) — didn’t settle for the ordinary, and I couldn’t let myself either,” she said. Corina started with Science Fiction and her advice is: “don’t turn in science fiction if you are not in a science fiction workshop.” Stuff she wrote that got panned in workshop sold to Sci-Fi magazines without any revisions. From there she tried historic fiction which went over better in class but her creative spirit wouldn’t allow her to play I straight. “I kept coming up with strange concepts for historical fiction — pickled heads in jars, midgets on trains, delusional car salesmen — and then I had this pile of stories.”

“After a little thought, I realized, “Why not a collection?” A little tweaking here and there, a few rewrites and some additions… After two years of workshop and revision I had All Along the Pacific,” Calsing told us.

The path we walk from where we begin a project to where they end can sometimes be a dark one. We may not know what comes next we can only light our way one story at a time. C.B. Calsing has illuminated our path with a tale about an outlaw, who is supposed to be dead, viewing his own head at a state fair, and a tale about a Chinese rail worker with much higher ambitions than anyone around him could imagine, and a tale about a common whore who really lives to protect herself and her “adopted” son. Though each of these stories are based in different time periods Corina Calsing has done a fantastic job of submerging us in these individual lives and leading us through time, showing us every step of the way the connections we all have to one another regardless of time and space.

All Along the Pacific is an anthology that is not to be missed and Corina Calsing is a writer that should not be over looked. Stick with us Friends and fans and we, I can promise you, will be bringing you the best of the best. In the end C.B. Calsing remains true to her creative roots and continues to experiment with her work.

“Since I’ve finished workshop, I’ve headed back into the realms of science fiction, and a little horror, but when I plan a big project, it still tends to be historical with a touch of magical realism. The work I’m finally returning to after about a year and a half off is just that — set in the bayou, during the Depression. An English botanist searching for a rare orchid falls into the trap of a backwoods giantess who distills sassafras moonshine and raises Cane Corsos. There are definitely elements of horror in it, but the story is more about mood and setting and detail than anything else.”

Most of the best stories are Corina, most of the best ones are.
Davin Kimble-Jr. Editor

C.B. Calsing was born and grew up in the small Central Coast town of San Luis Obispo, California. As a child, she spent long hours composing stories and plays. Half-way through her junior year in high school, she left to attend Cuesta Community College, where, after a few years of study, she received her associate of arts degree with honors. Following that, she transferred to Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. There, she completed her bachelor of arts in English. She took a year off, traveled to Indonesia and Ireland, and then decided to return to school to become a certified English teacher.

In 2002, fresh out of her studies, Mrs. Calsing and her future husband moved to New Orleans. Mrs. Calsing has worked in the field of education throughout the Greater New Orleans Area for the last eight years. In 2004, she married. Following her evacuation from Hurricane Katrina, Mrs. Calsing returned to New Orleans and began her master of fine arts degree in creative writing, fiction, at the University of New Orleans. She completed that in 2009. Now, she teaches middle school English, edits for a prominent e-book publisher, and writes when there is time.

“To Wade Alone,” a story from her upcoming collection All Along the Pacific, took second place in the On the Premises “First” contest in June 2009. Her work has appeared in college literary journals, guerrilla zines, and on Web sites, such as Crossedgenres.com. Her work also appeared in the anthologies An Honest Lie Volume One: Encouraging the Delinquency of your Inner Child and An Honest Lie Volume Two: Delusions of Insignificance, and Things We Are Not, a collection of queer science fiction.

Her two favorite genres to write are historic and science fiction, probably because both allow her to visit worlds different from her own. Up-to-the-minute information can be found at her blog, cbcalsing.blogspot.com.