When the Hawkweed Blooms

my very first published short story

Toldja it would look a little different.

This post is something of an experiment. It’s behind the paywall, but it’s also a story that you can find out there on the Interwebs, at its original home, the Canadian magazine Lackington’s Speculative Fiction, in their Cocktails issue. Sadly, Lackington’s is now defunct, but their website archives still work (for free), and I believe you can still buy old issues. I’d be very interested what you think of this combination of approaches.

The publishers link to Wikipedia to explain the magazine’s name:

James Lackington (31 August 1746, in Wellington, Somerset^[1] – 22 November 1815, in Budleigh Salterton, Devon^[2]) was a bookseller who is credited with revolutionizing the British book trade. He is best known for refusing credit at his London bookshop which allowed him to reduce the price of books throughout his store. He built the largest bookstore in the United Kingdom, with an inventory of over 500,000 volumes.

Likewise, I will explain one little detail today, borrowing from the Washington state Native Plant Society’s blog (more next week).

Why the hawk in hawkweed? According to L.H. Bailey's Manual of Cultivated Plants, Hieracium derives from Greek hierax, which means hawk. Bailey says that the ancient Greeks believed that hawks strengthened their vision by eating this plant.

D. Gordon E. Robertson, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Flower-eating raptors. Those wacky Greeks.

Coincidentally, for the non-plant nerds out there, remember Hawkwind? I don’t. I would actually have no idea who they were if I hadn’t read somewhere that Elric author Michael Moorcock worked with them for a long time.

However you reach it, enjoy the story.