Ursula Pflug’s After the Fires
I don’t remember where I first came across Ursula Pflug’s name. I know I’d seen it mentioned in several places before I stumbled across a collection of her short stories, After the Fires, at a recent book sale. From what I’d heard, she was a Canadian writer of literary fantasy, which was enough for me to take a chance on the book. On the whole, I think that was a good call.
What I’ve since found out about Pflug, mostly from her website or her publisher’s: She’s been publishing short fiction since 1981, and has sold over fifty stories. After the Fire, published in 2008 by Tightrope Books, is her first collection. She has a novel out from Tesseract Books, 2001’s Green Music, and another, Thin Wednesday, now looking for a publisher. An editor and creative writing teacher, as well as an essayist and playwright, she was formerly on the board of SF Canada, the professional association of Canadian speculative fiction writers.
There are ten stories and a poem in After the Fires. I note that the first piece in the book, “Memory Lapse at the Waterfront,” was her first published story; it was made into a short film in 1986 which is viewable online. One of the other stories, “Python,” won a short fiction competition in 1997, but only saw print in 2003, in Jeff VanderMeer’s Album Zutique anthology of surrealist fiction — then was reprinted in Mapping the Beast, VanderMeer’s selection of the best stories from Album Zutique and the Leviathan anthologies.
I’m busy.
About a month ago, The Avengers 
‘His eyes were icy verdigris, but warm also, and piercing — in a kind way. He was dressed smartly in a long coat of an almost military cut and dark pants with gold piping.’ So writes the narrator of the 2012 story, “The Portobello Cetacean” as she first lays eyes on her host, Sgt. Roman Janus, late of Mount Airy, the man known as the ‘spirit-breaker’.
