Miniature 20: Okra, Sorghum, Yam
Show Notes
Rated G. Contains three princesses.
Okra, Sorghum, Yam
by Bruce Holland Rogers
In his vegetable garden, Old Kwaku planted collard and okra and cowpeas. He showed the second princess how to cut the weeds down with a sharpened stick.
“I don’t think I’m learning any wisdom,” she said. “And look at my hands! Imagine what they’ll look like at the end of the summer!”
“Here is part of wisdom,” Old Kwaku said, and he began to rearrange some okra pods while they were still on their mother plants. He pulled one and nudged another and coaxed a third. He moved this one and that one together and tied the pods together in the shape of a little green person.
“That doesn’t look like wisdom to me,” the princess said. “Oh, I’m going to go home and die in my father’s house, an old maid!”
About the Author
Bruce Holland Rogers
Bruce Holland Rogers is an American author of short fiction who also writes under the pseudonym Hanovi Braddock. His stories have won a Pushcart Prize, two Nebula Awards, the Bram Stoker Award, two World Fantasy Awards, the Micro Award, and have been nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award and Spain’s Premio Ignotus.The 2001 short film The Other Side, directed by Mary Stuart Masterson, was based on his novelette, “Lifeboat on a Burning Sea.”
He is a member of the Wordos writers’ group and is a permanent member of the fiction faculty at the Whidbey Writers Workshop MFA program in creative writing of Northwest Institute of Literary Arts. He has taught fiction writing seminars in Denmark, Greece, Finland, and Portugal. In 2010 he taught at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest on a Fulbright grant.
About the Narrator
An Owomoyela
An (pronounce it “On”) Owomoyela is a neutrois author with a background in web development, linguistics, and weaving chain maille out of stainless steel fencing wire, whose fiction has appeared in a number of venues including Clarkesworld, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed, and a handful of Year’s Bests.
An’s interests range from pulsars and Cepheid variables to gender studies and nonstandard pronouns, with a plethora of stops in-between. Se can be found online at an.owomoyela.net.
