Good news! Aphrodite’s Cleft has been accepted by Cauldron Anthology, a literary journal about embracing the wild feminine, for their twelfth issue with the theme: Whore. To quote from the Cauldron Anthology website: “[A]ll about what it’s like to be a whore, a being that experiences pleasure and how those things are good. Whore has a gendered meaning but we want to include any definition of this word in our issue. We want this issue to be gender-positive and sex positive. And so without further ado the three mythological characters we’re working with this issue are: The Whore of Babylon, Salome and Aphrodite.”
As you probably guessed from the title, my story pertains to the last of the three female archetypes and recounts another adventure of McCrae Spenser, a young Scottish gentleman on his Grand Tour of Europe in the early 19th Century with a curious history of mishaps and falling into tight corners, all largely due to yours truly. Another Spenser story, An Etruscan Tomb, appeared last year in issue no. 24 of Tigershark, a UK magazine. In this new story, acting on a dare from a Orthodox priest, Spenser spends the night on the deserted beach of a small island where Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, is rumored to manifest herself as a towering column of sea spray. You can learn the juicy details when the new anthology’s out, which I’ll announce as soon as it happens.
A big shout out and much thanks to the staff of Cauldron Anthology for seeing the merit in this story. It’s a real treat to get published in a venue like this.