Thank You For Your Sperm

«As I’m recording this blog post I realize that I really, really...

Mon, 20 May 2013 17:41:00 +0200

«As I’m recording this blog post I realize that I really, really don’t like using this space to relate news, you know, raw information, subjective or objective, about what’s been happening or what happens right now. I really like to write nonfiction for the same reason and with the same aspiration as when I’m writing fiction: namely to surprise myself. I do not want to know beforehand what I’m going to say or, when I’ve said it, what I’m in for next by way of attention, or inspiration, or desperation. And I believe that this is exactly why you are reading this now. You’d like to be surprised; you’d like to have a thought that you didn’t have before, or a feeling not yet felt or have them with greater, or with less intensity, strength, duration than you’re used to. To find out what’s new you should join platforms that are known for, and to some extent have been optimized towards, sharing of news and daily information, like Facebook, Google+ or Twitter. I regularly look at my own Facebook page to prove to myself that new things are happening to me, too, but when I need confirmation that I’m still thinking bravely and feeling deeply I return to my blog.» [continue to read full post on the blog]

Thank You For Your Sperm will not help solve major global...

Sat, 18 May 2013 23:09:00 +0200

Thank You For Your Sperm will not help solve major global problems but it is art. Every copy counts. There is SO much you can do with this book: you can read this book, hold on to it, buy another and leave it at a coffee shop or at another public meeting place and thereby put it into widespread circulation. I dream of finding a copy of TYFYS one day somewhere at a completely unexpected place, say on the desk of a banker (not a sperm banker), or peeking out of the bag of a handyman or on a subway seat or in a museum shop or in the hands of a priest who’s reading TYFYS while queuing for pizza. Or in a photograph with the German chancellor who keeps TYFYS on the small coffee table visible in the photo shoot when she talks to other heads of state. She might even reach for it and hold it up: «by a German writer who composes in English,» she says proudly. «That is most impressive,» says her guest, «and why is it called “Thank You For Your Sperm”?» At which point the camera homes in on the title and on the angel. The chancellor never blushes.— Photo: TYFYS on the way to the beach.

«After twenty years of marriage K. had given H. everything...

Sun, 12 May 2013 15:31:00 +0200

«After twenty years of marriage K. had given H. everything except children. It was clearly too late for that. Everybody said so, especially the doctors, who were the experts on childbearing. H. had been 67 when he met K., who was 37 then. Biology had spoken.

For the first few years they made love like very young people again: without regard for time or space or the many demands of grown up life, which insert themselves so easily and effectively between a couple’s genitals. K. used protection, if only because that’s what she’d always done; and as if to show that even at his age he was still a responsible adult, H. used protection also, so that they were doubly sheathed against the chance of new life. …»

A different version of this story was published in 2012 at THIS literary magazine.

From all over the US people are sending me photos and letters,...

Sat, 11 May 2013 23:36:03 +0200

From all over the US people are sending me photos and letters, letters and photos, and letters, and photos. Today: Baltimore, Maryland writer Timmy Reed absorbs “Thank You For Your Sperm” so thoroughly that the cover temporarily replaces his face. Also, he finds himself transported to Germany. Miracles that only books can achieve. Thank you for picking TYFYS out of the pile! — THANK YOU FOR YOUR SPERM can be bought at MadHat Press or via Amazon, and you can get Timmy Reed’s own collection “Tell God I Don’t Exist” here. If your face, demeanor or location are affected by TYFYS, please do not worry, everybody who’s been afflicted has eventually turned back to normal or perhaps you’re better off. Some readers of #TYFYS have reportedly turned into Playboy bunnies, others have morphed into enormous sperm. This made them very happy.

«If there is a table at which the best writers of flash fiction...

Wed, 08 May 2013 19:49:00 +0200

«If there is a table at which the best writers of flash fiction should be seated, Marcus Speh deserves a chair – with his name on it. In four short years Speh has gone from obscure internet ego Finnegan Flawnt to nearly a household name, at least among the three thousand or so writers competing for that tight little club listed on Duotrope, championed by small press, and swirling in constant motion among the blogs and posts and coffee house readings out there these days. It’s an exciting time, a world without agents, where anyone with the will and imagination can start a literary magazine, but the truth will out, it always does, and someday soon flash fiction will not be so cutting edge, some other blade will be forged, and student’s will study and teachers will teach and the old ones will remember when. With the publication of his first collection, “Thank You For Your Sperm”, Speh is helping to launch this genre into the main stream. Someday, names will have to named, founders have to be found. I think this collection may be one of those…» [Read full review by Derek Osborne]

The photo shows a copy of “THANK YOU FOR YOUR SPERM”...

Sun, 05 May 2013 21:32:00 +0200

The photo shows a copy of “THANK YOU FOR YOUR SPERM” among work materials of the cover artist. The cover by my wife Carlye Birkenkrahe is, for me, an eyestopper. It would be easy to pick out this book because of it even if it didn’t have this confusing title. Yesterday in class I showed the cover to some students (not suggesting they should buy it which wouldn’t have been fair), but proud enough to mention it and one student (from the Philippines) after exclaiming “Sperm!” a number of times, clearly shocked to the core of his existence (did I go too far? It was an advanced MBA class on problem solving techniques, surely they could handle it?) asked what the cover image “meant”. I didn’t have an easy answer for him except that there are parallels between the imagery (mythology, angels, strong colors) and the content which I feel close to, the realm where I feel at home, where all manner of creatures, including men with wings, dwell, where dirty dogs dance, where characters dally and lose story ends dangle. Whatever the meaning, I love this cover. I hope we’ll collaborate on other books in the future. Here’s an article I wrote about her 2012-2013 exhibition in Berlin for Glow Magazine.

Against cultural pessimism

Sat, 04 May 2013 13:35:00 +0200

What I did this morning. Look into the abyss. Only just discovered this quote by Lionel Trilling, via Vargas Llosa’s book on cultural decadence in our time (“Alles Boulevard”; Suhrkamp). Interesting how Vargas Llosa (in the German translation of the Spanish original) gets this quote by Trilling wrong. By misquoting as if the students (and not the Abyss) had said “How interesting”, which he then uses as an indicator ofcultural decadence (the students’ inappropriate answer to the deep mystery of the Abyss). It’s pretty mean, that, and typical for (semi-professional) cultural pessimists who take their ammunition from anywhere or if none’s available, fabricate it. This book doesn’t really deserve being mentioned it’s not even well written (but I also don’t like his prose and I don’t understand how anybody can like it

—maybe he is one of those writers who gain enormously in their own language?). Vargas Llosa evidently doesn’t mind a little cheating, despite his 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature. Sadly he himself turns into a better example of cultural decay than the (made up) examples he presents. Needless to say, I’m not a cultural pessimist. I’m currently thinking about writing a book against cultural pessimism myself. Trouble is I don’t like cultural optimism either. Extreme positions can never reflect the complexity of truth, they can only cramp it with their zealousness. A book that does: Cultural History of the Modern Age by Egon Friedell (1927), beautifully written, too. He wrote: «We can never see the world other than incompletely: deliberately to see it as incomplete is to create an artistic aspect. »

«I am thinking along the distance between the time/energy/effort...

Fri, 03 May 2013 15:23:00 +0200

«I am thinking along the distance between the time/energy/effort that a writer expends to create a text, in this case your work, and the relative brevity that a reader expends in reading and absorbing it. Though I am not a stranger there is something for me exotic and different in the experience in picking it up in the media of a book. I feel in it something akin to when I lose touch with my own work and come on it in a different setting, or wake up with a phrase written in black ink on my palm and I don’t know why, or what it means and I wonder to myself where it came from though it seems quite familiar. I feel the best way to read “Thank You For Your Sperm” is to read a little bit then fall asleep, wake up, read a little bit more, maybe best on a train where one needs to be patient to sit and doze off until the last platform and with the elm trees and sun that rush past, or on a slow canal boat pulled by mules, or in a dream a revival tent with nearby bird song that beckons one away from important work. Regardless, with as much of life felt in between passages as between the worlds of words to be savored.» —Gabriel Orgrease pulling a packet boat after purchasing TYFYS.

altlitgossip: Buy this at Amazon now and I will Thank You For...

Thu, 02 May 2013 20:40:00 +0200

altlitgossip:

Buy this at Amazon now and I will Thank You For Your Sperm. Leave a review and I will Thank You For Your Sperm. Send me an encouraging comment and I will Thank You For Your Sperm. Pass this on to a powerful reviewer and I will Thank You For Your Sperm. Mention me in one sentence with your favorite authors and I will Thank You For Your Sperm. Give the book away to a donor and I will Thank You For Your Sperm. Say that I’m Alt Lit and I will Thank You For Your Sperm. Sell one of your duplicate DFW books to get the funds to buy this and I will Thank You For Your Sperm. Send your spouse to the next bookshop to get this and I will Thank You For Your Sperm. Talk about it to your friends and I will Thank You For Your Sperm.

Cover art by Carlye Birkenkrahe. Also available via MadHat Press.

«The woman brings her son to school. It is Monday and the...

Wed, 01 May 2013 12:10:01 +0200

«The woman brings her son to school. It is Monday and the weekend was good. She watched a little TV, won a few bucks in the lottery, which made her feel as if God remembered her, shagged the neighbour across the hall, a dark guy who always wore a dark suit and who was dark under his suit and made dark noises which made her tremble and like the darkness all over again just like when she was a girl and thought dark thoughts, and he gave her good dark deep dreams. Not a keeper though, just another Agency guy, probably married to an Agency chick, who worked at a desk all day building up tension and daydreaming about a life out in the field, doing good for the Agency.»

[From: Agencypiece, in: Thank You For Your Sperm, now available from MadHat Press or from Amazon][Photo: “Woman Of Darkness”, Sweden 1966]

the purpose of everything

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 16:03:45 +0200

«…with these words, my dear child, I shall leave you to your meditations: you must honor those who work with you; because to work in the world is to fight bad spirits. To be princely means to be an eye to the world, which sees things through you; it means to speak for the people as if your tongue was made of a thousand tongues. It means making up similes so that your people understand a thing from all sides. It means to be on the side of the poor, the weak and the needy: god is already punishing them and it is you who must help tip the scale towards remission. Whether you’re a woman or a man, but especially if you’re a woman, don’t believe everything the books say: many of them were written by scared, old monks. When you’ve lost your path: look at your feet, because they were made to carry on. Build something whenever you can…» — Gisela closed the book, put out the candle and opened her face to the dark. There was so much out there, so much to know and to see, that it was tempting to close her eyes to it all. Leave it to the more impassioned. Stay behind the walls with the guardians, hire people to think for you, write for you, live for you, die for you. She did not like to think of herself as a little girl. She liked to think of everyone else as being deformed and too large. While she was unsuccessfully groping for certainty, but enjoying the walk through her mind, an image built itself inside her; it was partly disturbing and partly comforting. Her body was connected to every other body. Was it something to do with that duty to build which the nameless emperor had spoken of in his book? Was building the purpose of everything? Was making connections a way of building? Or was it all about the joy of riding on top of a giant Earth worm? She muddled through minor thoughts trying to recover, but it was too late at night. It was fair enough to feel lost looking at creation. It was not all right to get lost and feel sorry for yourself because you were so small, especially if you were a princess. Either everybody was deformed, or nobody. She fell off the high cliff of her consciousness into a careless sleep…»

[Originally posted at 100 days and nights. Part of my flash novel “Gizella”, to be published by Folded Word Press.]

Bezos Loves Books...

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 12:55:00 +0100

…in fact, the Amazon CEO loves them so much that he has just bought Goodreads, a social media site for readers and writers with 16 millions followers. My response below (really more of a ramble) seems a tad confused even to me, the author, but these times are complicated. I sense a certain religious subtext but perhaps it can be forgiven because these times require special spirit and because books, after all, are items of a quasi-religious reverie to many of us…

The purchase, warmly described by Goodreads as “joining the Amazon family” & greeted with “Nooooooo!” by the Washington Post, is quite impressive on the open-ended monopoly scale. It follows a 40% stake in LibraryThing (2006) and the purchase of Abebooks (2008). LibraryThing is a service much like Goodreads that looks more like a librarian’s day dream. Abebooks is an online book store with a 1995 web design (a nostalgy trip for Bezos?)… [Continue reading…]

Readers of my posts or my fiction may think that I am all over...

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 18:43:00 +0100

Readers of my posts or my fiction may think that I am all over the place mentally, emotionally, procedurally…nothing could be further from the truth. I’m actually very structured, obsessed by detail and orderly to a fault. I’ve always been a maker and checker of lists, and I’ve always been interested in the workings of my mind as if it were someone else’s. Example: when I was 16 years old, I recorded and plotted all my school work hours vs my school results in order to figure out if I had a discernible biorhythms that would help me optimize the return on investment…we are still only talking about middle school here! When the picture below yesterday formed in my mind while I was thinking about the imminent publication of my story collection “Thank You For Your Sperm”, I was therefore not scared but pleased to continue a history of small, useful obsessions. I employed the kitchen blackboard to draw my “meta-verse”, the network that contains and generates many of my non-fiction pieces…

[Click to continue to full story]

“Asthmatic” lives close to the bone, close to my blood flow. The...

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 21:15:00 +0100

“Asthmatic” lives close to the bone, close to my blood flow. The background is very personal, more personal than any other story I’ve published except one titled “The Serious Writer And His Mother” which also deals with death (also in TYFYS). The earliest version of “Asthmatic” was written on the train, the same train that had brought me, a few years earlier, to Hamburg on the day my father had died and lay in state in his apartment so that we could say our good-byes to him. After his death I developed a serious case of (temporary) asthma. I say ‘in response’ because he’d suffered from pulmonary problems for years before his death, and though I don’t know the exact pathways that my unconscious traveled in order to come up with the idea, I remain convinced to this day, that my asthma was part of my grieving process. — I’m equally convinced, as the narrator say, that asthma is a refusal to take life in the form of breath. It is of course, possible to live a very long time that way. It is even possible to write, and write well—an excellent writer like William Gass strikes me that way, and there are others who seem miraculously (given their mastery of the craft) restricted, or self-restricting. It may be as simple as fear of one’s death. Respect of death, and love for life is a sure sign of (writerly) health. For me, the death of loved ones forms the core of my sincerity. Thinking of them and of the experience of loss surrounding their deaths helps me refocus on existential issues, on the issue of being a man, of being true.

[“Asthmatic” is part of my collection “Thank You For Your Sperm” available now via MadHat Press or Amazon][Read full post “The Death of Breath” and the story “Asthmatic” here.]

DO CONTEMPORARY WRITERS WHO LEAVE OUT TECHNOLOGY MISREPRESENT...

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 10:42:00 +0100

DO CONTEMPORARY WRITERS WHO LEAVE OUT TECHNOLOGY MISREPRESENT LIVE AS BADLY AS VICTORIAN WRITERS MISREPRESENTED LIFE BY LEAVING OUT SEX? (David Shields paraphrasing Kurt Vonnegut in “How Literature Saved My Life”.)

«This reminds me of the feud between H G Wells, the very political writer of action-driven grand human designs (and also consummate storyteller) and Henry James, who consciously stayed away from any contemporary dialogue, political crisis or technological excitement (of which there were many in his day, his grownup life having unfolded between the Civil War and WW I) and was heavily critisized by Wells for that. Interestingly not by G B Shaw, a writer no less political than Wells (rather more so). Shaw saw more clearly, I speculate, that the deepest commentary on humanity is not to be had by commenting on the action of man but by exploring character and setting characters against one another. To complete this quartet, another thinker and writer comes to mind, Bertrand Russell, who went yet another path by writing his most influential English non-fiction series specifically targeting topics of the day: modern marriage, religion, philosophy, history…when all these things still meant something, before the great wars and the Holocaust melded them into one thing that’s very hard to describe and do justice to. — Four radically different (European) approaches to the Vonnegut challenge……one might also add that Victorian writers may have represented Victorian life much more accurately by leaving out sex than if they had included it.»

From a discussion started by Ramon Collins @ Fictionaut. — Image: The gymnasticon, a late-18th-century exercise machine invented by Francis Lowndes [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Linguistic Cross-Dressing For more than 10 years I have been...

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 11:51:00 +0100

Linguistic Cross-Dressing

For more than 10 years I have been regularly tormenting myself with the question whether I am better off writing in my mother tongue, German, than in English, which is a language I acquired in passing as it were but which is not mine by birthright.

I suppose this torment might appear to others as a privilege, and complaining about the choice will seem a luxury to them. But the world created by one’s intellect to understand and perhaps to describe the world not created by one’s intellect is made valuable mainly by privileged choices. Choices which are rooted in complex concepts like morality and loyalty, which must be opened up by reflection rather than closed by action. Therefore I cannot feel too sorry for myself for having the problem though I do feel and have felt very sorry for not finding a solution.

So much so that lately I was fed up and I decided that perhaps the problem itself was the solution I needed. That oscillating between both languages, using them as it were to cast a different image of the same idea, struggling with them in very different ways, was the very core of my being a writer.

[Read full article at Yareah Magazine][Photo: Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin, 1892—1940, German literary critic, philosopher, social critic, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist.]

Arnie in Asheville

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 18:40:00 +0100

I don’t know how many times I have tried in vain to describe what I feel for this action hero, this Kennedy-and-California infiltrating Austrian poser how much I admire his bulging ego and his love for animals which is featured too little in the media that seem to focus on the bluest lapis lazuli ever seen on the hand of a manly man, of a terminator no, of The Terminator, The Eraser, the extinguisher of distinguished one-liners, who said cockily once “Luck is for the unprepared” only to raise his rifle again, whip out a mighty machine gun like cream, who walks with more panache than even a Texan, and fathers children like other men pop doping pills.

I’m not saying you should follow me where I’m going with this. I know that I’m rambling, but I’m rambling on behalf of a silent majority that values the body more highly than the brain and isn’t afraid to say so.

But I have reserved my silver bullet for the end: after witnessing what fellow actor James Franco can do with words, Arnie has also taken a pen in his fist, gripped it firmly like a rifle butt and put it to good use by writing a poem on Nanni Moretti. Not a bad one, I hasten to add, and not one of the best poems ever written either. But a solid hommage on this Italian, borrowing strength from Franco’s inauguration intelligence by dropping the names of many artists, and including in a daring feat of novelty the name of a housekeeper who supposedly bore Moretti’s illegitimate child, touchingly not unlike Arnie’s own story. Asked why he chose this improbable target as the subject of his first poetic impulse, Arnie said: it’s not my first, I used to compose verse for my mother while she worked the cash register so that I could pump iron. And also, he added eloquently with a nod of his patrician head and with barely an accent “Io sono un autarchico.” The journalists who were present drooled. Before leaving, Arnie said he was already talking to Woody Allen about playing a gay Austrian-American, black unemployed billionaire ex-actor immigrant who miraculously succeeds against the odds against the establishment while always smiling not ashamed of his crooked teeth, in Allen’s new feature on Vienna and Freud: he loves my accent, Arnie says, and he liked me in Kindergarten Cop and Twins, he really did.

I’m not saying you should follow me where I’m going with this. I know that I’m rambling, but I’m rambling on behalf of a silent majority that values the brain more highly than the body and isn’t afraid to say so.

Note: I wrote this shortly after reading and listening to the inauguration poem “Obama in Asheville” written and performed by James Franco, commissioned by Yahoo. Image: original drawing by ORDENSsekretariat.at distributed via Wikimedia under the terms of the free GNU documentation license. Drawing modified by me.

“I’m interested in the concept of time that dominates the...

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 21:45:00 +0100

“I’m interested in the concept of time that dominates the user interface of Facebook. Unless I’m very different from everyone else, I don’t live my life along a ‘Timeline‘. If I live my life at all (rather than being lived by it) then it is because I manage to forget time. And where time is important and relevant (apart from preparing food, picking kids up from school, attending meetings and so on) it certainly doesn’t seem linear at all. When time itself is of the essence (not just time’s starved cousin, the minute), it goes all over the place: any memory (and how can you do anything without memory, isn’t that part of the Alzheimer tragedy?) leads time astray. Our mind is a curious monkey. And the future! It’s not a line, it’s a messy bundle of multicolored threads, just like the past is a bunch of black and white rubber bands. That’s why I don’t do “linear” on my timeline. That’s why I focus on photos accompanied by meager descriptions: when you gaze at visuals, your brain feeds on nonlinearity information. The pixels wank you well. Only archived records and polished junk prose are linear: they’re dead leaves, that’s why no one really reads them. Outside of science and the marketplace, in the real world, time is what happens between birth and death. Facebook’s Timeline makes all of it look like a book, while in truth it’s more like a mud bath, just as hard to analyze and sometimes hard to appreciate. Only when you accept that time can be dirty and unreliable, fancy and fertile, only then can time become your friend. This is not the kind of treatment that time gets get from the real philosophers, who worried about the nature of Time (Heidegger, Bergson, Nietzsche, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Einstein, McTaggart etc.), but this is also just a post that will end up lost on my blog and later on Facebook…”

[Read full post «Writing As Time Travel»][Image: Nietzsche brooding]

When I was five years old, my father told me a sci-fi story...

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 11:57:00 +0100

When I was five years old, my father told me a sci-fi story every night. The protagonist was a five-year-old boy whose parents had perished with everyone else on earth. I alone had been saved by an alien species, who called themselves “the golden men”. Even though they cared for me, I escaped every night to look for my real parents. One of my friends was an enormous ant who lived on the moon and had built a time machine which allowed me to go all over the place. I had many adventures this way though I also felt quite sad often. I wasn’t sure if I was entitled to be sad: after all I had been spared! This went on for several years.

[Published in: Dog-Ear][Photo: modified still from People Get Ready’s “Windy Cindy”][More momentary art at Speh-Kunst][German translation]

The Rat King

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 20:00:00 +0100

The man stopped reading. The girl looked at him: “Did you honestly think, daddy that this story would scare me? Don’t you know how old I am? Do you know anything about me? I read the last Harry Potter book when I was seven,” she said. “Well,” said her father, “truth be told your mother read it to you. And she gave the old Rowling a sanitizing makeover so that you wouldn’t be traumatized for the rest of your life.” He smiled one of those smiles that he had smiled for the first thirteen years of her life, but lately, as now, his smile had only embarrassed his daughter, as if he was pretending an intimacy that she had begun to shed like dry snakeskin.

On a balcony outside of the small apartment, The Lord of Demon Flies stood listening and glistening in the rain. All along the street the rats had emerged from the sewers. Paws raised, they looked up at their Lord as large, cold drops fell on them and soaked the hairs that had been so carefully braided in preparation for Halloween and the Great Demon Flight. What was their master doing up there with the humans? Why wasn’t he preaching to them?

The father left the room and closed the door behind him. He took his story with. Perhaps it was time to stop reading to the child. Perhaps it was time to stop thinking of her as a child. As he stood in the corridor, he had a sudden bad feeling like a draft from some unclosed window of the soul. He stopped and wondered if he should go back and check up on the girl, but he hesitated: he’d been too cautious since his wife had died. It was clear that his daughter needed space above all. He scuffled to his desk, back to his work and put on headphones to listen to music. The house fell still.

The girl opened her laptop. Behind her, Beelzebub changed into a fat, iridescent green horsefly, buzzed around her head and landed on top of the web cam. The girl had joined a hangout. A dozen teenagers from around the world were logged in and chatting all at the same time. The girl was jiggling around like Beyonce, so that Beelzebub in his insect self felt competitive with the human and joined her in mid air for a little dance.

The girl tolerated the buzzing body for a bit, but when she felt too bothered she grabbed the fly with a quick left hand and squished it, so that the Prince of Darkness had difficulty escaping and, as there was no time to find another small body, he entered the computer.

But the electrical impulses hit him with unexpected force and his spirit was drawn further into the machine. Like a drowning man he was pulled out to the open sea. Deep currents of communication, stronger than anything he had experienced throughout millennia, held him there. Millions of man-made tiny silvery switches and golden gateways were processing him like freshly caught fish in a can factory. Only fractions of a second later – he himself didn’t know how it had happened – the Dark One was spread out over the entire net. His great evil was distributed too thinly now across the planet to do any harm to anyone for a long time except through flame wars, hate mail and small furious comments on Facebook.

Down on the street, as the clock was eating away at Halloween, the rat mob gave up on their king and the rodents slowly disappeared into the night.

From: “A Rat Story“, collaborative “Halloween Garage Sale” motivated and coordinated by Jules Archer (posted Oct 27, 2012). This was my part—the complete story including the parts written by Jules Archer, Meg Tuite, Julie Innis and Susan Tepper is here.