WEIRD LIFE

ABOUT ME

A Weird Life

Margaret Riley worked hard to gain a strange education. She majored in 19th century literature before joining the Peace Corps, where she learned speak Thai, love teaching, and politely eat whatever was offered her. She volunteered for Mother Teresa at Shishu Bhavan, trekked the Himalayas, and kayak-camped through France. When she returned to the US, she started teaching environmental science at an outdoor program she ended up running. Then, armed with twenty years of the ‘What if?’ questions posed by students ages 5-95, she began to write.

Margaret’s current hobbies include kayaking (slowly), cross-country skiing (even more slowly), and taking photographs that make something real look imagined. She lives in Spearfish, SD with her husband, Clay, and their sons Liam and Finn.

“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.”
~Albert Einstein

If it is true that bacterial cells outnumber the human cells in our body by a factor of ten—why can’t we recognize ourselves for what we are: A shambling colony of survivors?

And if we go that far, we should take it one step farther. I suggest there is much we don’t know about ourselves as a colony. Considering the implausibility of what we know to be true, there is likely more truth out there that is even less plausible.

~ Excerpt from Sleep of Reason

Los Caprichos - Francisco Goya.

A NOVEL

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

What if the apocalypse doesn’t arrive with four horsemen and a hail of frogs? What if it slips in sideways, unnoticed on the back of a billion bad decisions? What if it has started already?

Astrobiologist Dr. LeeCee Schofield should be ecstatic when she finds evidence of a new species deep below the Antarctic ice. Instead, as her research progresses, she has to decide whether she is losing her mind or uncovering impossible truths. And losing her mind might be simpler as her discoveries are terrifying: Not only are we not alone in the cosmos, we are not alone in our own bodies. The alien other we have looked for is not out there but in us, and resembles nothing so much as the “soul.” And it is dying, suffering a kind of colony collapse that threatens to take our humanity with it.

by Dr. Graham Beards

Learn the Science

It’s hard even now to believe that I am here and you are not. Hard to understand that the stars are wild and bright in the firmament & you are not here to share them. Hard to know I will not watch as our child grows inside you. I remind myself of all the reasons we chose to part, but I cannot help but wonder ... what kind of man leaves his beloved so.

This night, I know I am a monster, a wretch, a fiend. And yet, I hope if I must be so, then you and I … “shall be monsters together, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another.”

Your most Beloved Monster,
John

~ Excerpt from The Odd Shelf

Auguste Francois Biard, Magdalena Bay 1840

A NOVEL

The Odd Shelf

Lois is an outgoing librarian in a small southern town who hates to travel and has worked hard to have a spectacularly normal life. But the arctic dreams she’s pushed herself to ignore are starting to push back. Jack has long left normal behind, along with his sensible job researching memory in mice. He’s in a professional free fall, following the images in his head to the Arctic ... and, ultimately, to Lois.

As Lois and Jack’s stories spiral into each other, John and Lena Kenley's parallel tale is told in haunting flashback as an epistolary romance. The strength of their connection is dragging their ancestors through snow and ice to uncover the truth: Sometimes who we are is less important than who we were, and who we were stays with us—ghosts in our machine—encoded in our DNA.