CZM Book Club: Selkie Stories Are For Losers, by Sofia Samatar

Margaret reads you a story about yearning and magic and folklore and teenage gays.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media book Club book Club, book Club book Club.
It's the Cool Zone Media book Club. Welcome nicols On
Media book Club, the only book club where you don't
have to do the reading because I do it for you.
I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy and this week I'm going

(00:23):
to read you a story by one of my favorite authors,
Sophia's Semitar.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
The story is called Selki Stories Are for Losers and
it was published in twenty thirteen by Strange Horizons, and
you can also get it in Sofia's twenty nineteen collection Tender.
This story was nominated for just a fuck ton of
awards in twenty fourteen, basically the big ones, the Hugo,
the Nebula, the World Fantasy Award, and the BSFA Award,

(00:51):
which is the British Award basically. And it's a Selki story,
as you might have guessed because the title is Selki
Stories are for Losers, and I guess we're all losers
because this is a Selky story for us. And Selkies
are a part of Celtic and Norse myth originally, and
Selkies are people, usually women. They're se ole people and

(01:12):
they can transform between seal and human form by putting
on their seal skins. In a classic Selky story, a
guy will see like a hot seal lady and steal
her skin, forcing her to be stuck as a human,
and then usually he'll marry her and she'll be sad
and lonely and miss the sea, and if she manages
to get back her skin, she'll disappear and ditch her

(01:32):
husband captor and her kids and fuck off to the sea.
There's a lot there, obviously from a feminist point of view.
One of the things that I find really interesting is
that there's this sort of medieval European conception of women
where it's not that women are like docile, like the
way that the Victorian women is presented, but instead that
women are naturally wild and untamed. And you know, there's

(01:56):
this been complete switch of what misogyny like it used
to look like, calling us wild and untamed, and now
it accuses us of being docile or whatever. So the
Selky myth ties so well into this idea that like
women in their original state are these wild creatures. Okay,
that's the basic outline of what a Selky story might

(02:17):
be for context, but it's not this story. This story
it's called selky stories are for losers by Sophia Somitar.
I hate selky stories. They're always about how you went
up to the attic to look for a book and
you found a disgusting old coat and brought it downstairs

(02:40):
between finger and thumb and said, what's this? And you
never saw your mom again. I work at a restaurant
called Lapacha. I got the job after my mom left
to help with the bills. On my first night at work,
I got yelled at twice by the head server, burnt
my fingers on a hot day, spilled lentil parsley soup

(03:02):
all over my apron, and left my keys in the kitchen.
I didn't realize at first I'd forgotten my keys. I
stood in the parking lot, breathing slowly and letting the
oil smell lift away from my hair. And when all
the other cars had started up and driven away, I
put my hand in my jacket pocket. Then I knew.

(03:23):
I ran back to the restaurant and banged on the door.
Of course no one came. I smelled cigarette smoke an
instant before I heard the voice Hey. I turned and
Mona was standing there, smoke rising white from between her fingers.
I left my keys inside, I said. Mona is the
only other server at Lapacha who's a girl. She is

(03:46):
related to everybody at the restaurant except me. The owner
who goes by Uncle Tad is really her uncle, her
mom's brother. Don't talk to him unless you have to.
Mona advised me he's a creeper. That was after she'd
sighed and dropped her cigarette and crushed it out with
her shoe and stepped into my clasped hands so I

(04:06):
could boost her up to the window. After she'd wriggled
through the kitchen and opened the door for me, she
said madame in a dry voice and bowed. At least
I think she said madame. She might have said, my lady.
I don't remember that night too well because we drank
a lot of wine. Mona said that as long as

(04:28):
we were breaking and entering, we might as well steal something,
and she lined up all the bottles of red wine
that had already been opened. I shone the light from
my phone on her while she took out the special
rubber corks and poured some of each bottle into a
plastic pitcher. She called it the house wine. I was
surprised she was being so nice to me, since she'd

(04:49):
hardly spoken to me while we were working. Later, she
told me she hates everybody the first time she meets them.
I called home, but Dad didn't pick up. He was
probably in the basement. I left him a message and
turned off my phone. Do you know what this guy
said to me tonight? Mona asked he want a beef
couscous and he said, I'll have the beef conscious. Mona's

(05:11):
mom doesn't work it Lepatcha, but sometimes she comes in
around three o'clock and sits in Mona's section and cries.
Then Mona jams on her orange baseball cap and goes
out through the back and smokes a cigarette, and I
take over her section. Mona's mom won't order anything from me.
She's got Mona's eyes or Mona's got hers, huge angry

(05:35):
eyes with lashes that curl up at the ends. She
shakes her head and says nothing nothing. Finally, Uncle Tad
comes over and Mona's mom hugs and kisses him sobbing
in Arabic. After work, Mona says, got the keys. We
get in my car and I drive us through town

(05:56):
to the bone. Zone, a giant cemetery on a hill.
I pull into the empty parking lot and Mona rolls
a joint. There's only one lamp burning high and cold
in the middle of the lot. Mona pushes her shoes
off and puts her feet up on the dashboard and cries.
She warned me about that the night we met. I
said something stupid to her, like you're so funny, and

(06:19):
she said, actually, I cry a lot. That's something you
should know. I was so happy she thought I should
know things about her. I didn't care. I still don't care.
But it's true that Mona cries a lot. She cries
because she scared her mom will take her away to Egypt,
where the family used to live and where Mona has
never been. What would I do there? I don't even

(06:40):
speak Arabic. She wipes her mascara on her sleeve, and
I tell her to look at the lamp outside and
pretend that its glassy brightness is a bonfire, and that
she and I are personally throwing every selky story ever
written onto it and watching them burn up. You and
your selky stories, she says. I tell her they're not

(07:01):
my sulky stories, not ever. And I'll never tell one
which is true. I never will, And I don't tell
her how I went up to the attic that day,
or that what I was looking for was a book
I used to read when I was little, Beauty and
the Beast, which is a really decent story about an
animal who gets turned into a human and stays that

(07:22):
way the way it's supposed to be. I don't tell
Mona that Beauty's black hair coiled to the edge of
the page, or that the beast had yellow horns and
a smoking jacket, or that instead of finding the book,
I found the coat, and my mom put it on
and went out the kitchen door and started up her car.

(07:44):
And do you know what, I think she was leaving
the house to go? Do I think she was leaving
the house to take advantage of these products and services.
I think that's the most likely thing. I haven't finished
reading this story yet, so I don't know what's going
to happen, But I assume that what happened was that
she went out because she heard these acts. And we're back.

(08:17):
One sulky story tells about a man from Merthur Toller.
He was on the cliffs one day and heard people
singing and dancing inside a cave, and he noticed a
bunch of skins piled on the rocks. He took one
of the skins home and locked it in a chest,
And when he went back, a girl was sitting there
alone crying. She was naked, and he gave her some

(08:39):
clothes and took her home. They got married and had kids.
You know how this goes. One day the man changed
his clothes and forgot to take the key to the
chest out of his pocket, and when his wife washed
the clothes, she found it. You're not going to Egypt,
I tell Mona. We're going to Colorado. Remember that's our

(09:01):
big dream, to go to Colorado. It's where Mona was born.
She lived there until she was four. She still remembers
the rocks and the pines in the cold, cold air.
She says, the clouds of Colorado are bright like pieces
of mirror. In Colorado, Mona's parents got divorced, and Mona's
mom tried to kill herself for the first time. She

(09:24):
tried it once here too. She put her head in
the oven, resting on a pillow. Mona is in seventh grade.
Selkies go back to the sea in a flash like
they've never been away. That's one of the ways they're
different from human beings. Once my dad tried to go
back somewhere. He was in the army stationed in Germany,

(09:46):
and he went to Norway to look up the town
where my great grandmother came from. He actually found the
place and even an old farm with the same name
as us. In the town. He went into a restaurant
and ordered lutefish, a disgusting fish thing my grandmother makes.
The cook came out of the kitchen and looked at
him like he was nuts. She said they only eat

(10:08):
lutfish at Christmas. There went Dad's plan of bringing back
the original flavor of lutfish. Now all he's got from
Norway is my great grandmother's Bible. There's also the diary
she wrote on the farm up north, but we can't
read it. There's only four English words in the whole book.

(10:29):
My God, awful day. You might suspect my dad picked
my mom up in Norway, where they have seals. He didn't,
though he met her at the pool. As for Mom,
she never talked about her relatives. I asked her once
if she had any, and she said they were no
kind of people. At the time, I thought she meant

(10:52):
they were druggies or murderers, maybe in prison somewhere. Now
I wish that was true. One of the stories I
Don't tell Mona comes from a dictionary of British folklore
in the English language. In that story, it's the Sulkies
little girl who points out where the skin is hidden.

(11:13):
She doesn't know what's going to happen, of course, she
just knows her mother is looking for a skin, and
she remembers her dad taking one out from under the
bed and stroking it. The little girl's mother drags out
the skin and says, fair wheel pieri. Butto she doesn't
think about how the little girl is going to miss her,
or how she's been breathing air all this time. She

(11:34):
can surely keep it up a little longer. She just
throws on the skin and jumps into the sea. After
Mom left, I waited for my dad to get home
from work. He didn't say anything when I told him
about the coat. He stood in the light of the
clock on the stove and rubbed his fingers together softly,

(11:54):
almost like he was snapping, but with no sound. Then
he sat down at the kitchen table and lit a cigarette.
I'd never seen him smoke in the house before. Mom's
going to lose it, I thought, And then I realized
that no, my mom wasn't going to lose anything. We
were the losers, me and Dad. He still waits up

(12:18):
for me, So just before midnight I pull out of
the parking lot. I'm hoping to get home early enough
that he doesn't grumble, but late enough that he doesn't
want to come up from the basement where he takes
apart old TVs and talk to me about college. I've
told him I'm not going to college. I'm going to Colorado,
a landlocked state. Only twenty out of fifty states are

(12:42):
completely landlocked, which means they don't touch the Great Lakes
or the Sea. Mona turns on the light and tries
to put on eyeliner in the mirror, and I swerve
to make her mess up. She turns out the light
and hits me. All the windows are down to air
out the car, and Mona's hair blows wild around her face.

(13:03):
Peery butto the book says, is a quote term of endearment.
Peerie butto I say to Mona, she's got the hiccups.
She can't stop laughing. I've never kissed Mona. I've thought
about it a lot, but I keep deciding it's not time.
It's not that I think she'd freak out or anything.

(13:24):
It's not even that I'm afraid she wouldn't kiss me back.
It's worse. I'm afraid she'd kiss me back, but not
mean it. But do you know what we say but
don't mean that. We love our sponsors here they are,
We love.

Speaker 3 (13:41):
Them and Rebecca.

Speaker 2 (13:56):
Probably one of the biggest losers to fall in love
with a selkie was the man who carried her skin
around in his knapsack. He was so scared she'd find
it that he took the skin with him everywhere when
he went fishing, when he went drinking in the town.
Then one day he had a wonderful catch of fish.
There were so many that he couldn't drag them all

(14:17):
home in his net. He emptied his knapsack and filled
it with fish, and he put the skin over his shoulder,
and on his way up the road to his house,
he dropped it. Gray in the front and gray in
the back. Does the very thing I lack. That's what
the man's wife said when she found the skin. The
man ran to catch her. He even kissed her, even

(14:39):
though she was already a seal, but she squirmed off
down the road and flopped into the water. The man
stood knee deep in the chilly waves, stinking of fish,
and cried in sulky stories. Kissing never solves anything. No
transformation happens because of a kiss. No one loves you
just because you love them. What kind of fairy tale

(15:02):
is that she wouldn't wake up? Mona says, I pulled
her out of the oven onto the floor, and I
turned off the gas and opened the windows. It's not
that I was smart. I wasn't thinking at all. I
called Uncle Tad and the police, and I still wasn't thinking.

(15:23):
I don't believe she wasn't smart. She even tried to
give her mom a CPR, but her mom didn't wake
up until later in the hospital. They had to reach
in and drag her out of death. She was so
closed up in it. Death is skin tight. Mona says,
gray in front and gray in back. Dear Mona, When
I look at you, my skin hurts. I pull into

(15:47):
her driveway to drop her off. The house is dark,
the darkest house on her street, because Mona's mom doesn't
like the porch light on. She says, it shines in
around the blinds and keeps her Awakea's has a beautiful
bedroom upstairs with lots of old photographs and gilt frames,
but she sleeps on the living room couch beside the aquarium.

(16:09):
Looking at the fish helps her to sleep, although she
also says this country has no real fish. That's what
Mona calls one of her mom's refrains. Mona gets out
yanking the little piece of my heart that stays with
her wherever she goes. She stands outside the car and
leans in through the open door. I can hardly see her,

(16:30):
but I can smell the lemon scented stuff she puts
on her hair, mixed up with the smells of sweat
and weed. Mona smells like a forest, not the sea.
Oh my god, she says, I forgot to tell you tonight.
You know Table six, that big horde of Uncle Tad's friends. Yeah,
so they wanted the soup with the food, and I forgot.

(16:53):
And you know what the old guy says to me,
the little guy at the head of the table, what
he Goeste Bete mademoiselle, She says it in a rough,
growly voice and laughs, I can tell it's French, but
that's all.

Speaker 3 (17:09):
What does it mean?

Speaker 2 (17:10):
You're an idiot? Miss? She ducks her head, stiffling giggles.
He called you an idiot? Yeah, bet, it's like beast.
She lifts her head, then shakes it. A light from
someone else's porch bounces off her nose. She puts on
a fake Norwegian accent and says, my god, awful day,

(17:32):
I nod awful day. And because we say it all
the time, because it's the kind of silly, ordinary thing
you could call one of our refrains, or maybe because
of the weed I've smoked. A whole bunch of days
seemed pressed together inside this moment, more than you could count.
There's the time we all went out for New Year's
Eve and Uncle Tad drove me, And when he stopped

(17:55):
and I opened the door, he told me to close it,
and I said, I will when I'm on the side.
And when I told Mona, we laughed so hard we
had to run away and hide in the bathroom. There's
the day some people we know from school came in
and we served them wine even though they were under age,
and Mona got nervous and spilled it all over the tablecloth.

(18:15):
And the day her nice cousin came to visit and
made us cheese and mint sandwiches in the microwave and
got yelled at for wasting food. And the day of
the party for Mona's mom's birthday, when Uncle Tad played
music and made us all dance, and Mona's mom's eyes
went Julie with tears. And afterward Mona told me I

(18:37):
should just run away. I'm the only thing keeping her here.
My god, awful days, all the best days of my life. Bye,
Mona whispers. I watch her until she disappears into the house.
My mom used to swim every morning at the YWCA
when I was little. She took me along. I didn't

(19:00):
like swimming. I'd sit in a chair with a book
while she went up and down, up and down a
dim streak in the water. When I read Miss Frisbee
and the Rats of nim it seemed like Mom was
a labrat doing tasks the way she kept touching one
side of the pool and then the other. At last,
she climbed out and pulled off her bathing cap. In

(19:21):
the locker room, she hung up her suit, a thin
gray rag dripping on the floor. Most people put the
hook of their padlock through the straps of their suit
so the suits could hang outside the lockers without getting stolen.
But my mom never did that. She just tied her
suit loosely.

Speaker 3 (19:38):
On the lock.

Speaker 2 (19:39):
No one's going to steal that stretchy old thing, she said,
and no one did. That should have been the end
of the story, but it wasn't. My dad says Mom
was an elemental, a sort of stranger, not of our kind.
It wasn't my fault she left. It was because she
couldn't learn to breathe on land. That's the worst story

(20:01):
I've ever heard. I'll never tell Mona, not ever, not
even when we're leaving for Colorado with everything we need
in the back of my car, and I meet her
at the grocery store the way we've already planned, and
she runs out, smiling under her orange baseball cap. I
won't tell her how dangerous attics are, or how some
people can't start over, or how I still see my

(20:24):
mom in the shop windows with her long hair the
same silver gray as her coat, or how once when
my little cousins came to visit, we went to the zoo,
and the seals recognized me. They both stood up in
the water and talked in a foreign language. I won't
tell her, I'm too scared. I won't even tell her
what she needs to know, that we've got to be

(20:46):
tougher than our mom's, that we've got to have different stories.
That she'd better not change her mind and drop me
in Colorado because I won't understand. I'll hate her forever
and burn her stuff and stay up all night screaming
at the wood because it's stupid not to be able
to breathe. Whoever heard of somebody breathing in one place
but not another? And we're not like that, Mona and

(21:08):
Me and Selky stories are only for losers, stuck on
the wrong side of magic. People who drop things, who
tell all, who leave keys around, who let go.

Speaker 3 (21:23):
The end.

Speaker 2 (21:25):
This story was picked out by my friend Hazel, who
said this about it. Selky stories are for losers, like
they're for suckers. But Selky stories are also for losers,
people who lose people and need to make sense of
that loss. And we asked Sophia if there's anything she
wanted to include in this reading, and she had this
to say about the piece quote. I think what I'd

(21:48):
want to say about this story is that it marked
a turning point in my writing practice. Writing it, I
understood for the first time what a short story was.
I learned this by studying Karen joifouls excellent story King Rat,
which also uses a mixture of realism and folklore. And
that makes sense to me, because honestly, I am blown

(22:11):
away by the craft of this story. I think that
this story is well. I've already been saying for years
that Sofia Samitar's story The Ogres of East Africa is
my favorite short story, and it's true thematically and prose wise,
but also just on this like craft level.

Speaker 3 (22:27):
I'm just really.

Speaker 2 (22:28):
Blown away by how Sophia writes. I think that the
way that this story, the Selky story, is telling two
parallel stories at the same time, with these like brilliant
overlaps and parallels that are still remarkably different, like culturally different,
like you know, I'm afraid It'll be taken back to

(22:48):
Egypt versus like I'm going to move to a landlocked state.
And obviously the parallel about the way in which both
of their mothers have attempted to leave And it's interesting because,
by default, when I think of Selky stories, I really
think about, you know, the running back to the wild
and sort of abandoning the family. But then this story is, well,
there's a little bit of that. It's also just like

(23:09):
clearly about like death and being sort of too wild
to be alive in some ways. And you know, when
I hear a Selki story, traditionally my thoughts are like, fuck, yeah,
she got away from that guy, right, But then positioning
in it from the point of view of the kids,
it deepens a feminist understanding of what it means to

(23:30):
feel trapped by a family, you know, and it complicates
it in this way that I think is necessary and
makes it no longer.

Speaker 3 (23:37):
So black and white.

Speaker 2 (23:39):
So yeah, I've enjoyed the story every time I've read it,
and I will probably come back to it just from
a craft level to study it further. I really can't
say enough about it, but I will say that Sophia's
most recent books, if you want to read more of
her stuff, are the science fiction novella The Practice, The

(24:00):
Horizon and The Chain, which was a finalist for the
Hugo Nebula. Philip K. Dick and Locus Awards and Opacities
on Writing and the Writing Life, A Meditation on Writing, Publishing,
and Friendship. And I'm going to go out and get
both of those books. And I have like a thing
where I really like books about writing, but most of

(24:21):
them aren't very good, and I suspect that this one
will be very good. And I really like how different
every author who writes books about writing is going to
write a book like it's a very you think it'd
be a very like standard kind of textbooky thing, but
everyone's books are so completely different, even like Jeffvandermer is

(24:43):
two different books on writing and they're night and day
different from each other. One's called Wonder Book and it's
like esoteric and feels like you're on LSD, but it
also teaches you about story. And one's called I think
it's called The Writing Life or something, and it's just
about how to not lose your brain.

Speaker 3 (25:01):
Anyway.

Speaker 2 (25:01):
I don't know what I'm talking about that, but if
you want to keep up with Sophia Semtar's work, you
can do that. I believe she's not on social media.
I believe she is free, but she has a website.
Sofia Samitar dot com, which is s O F I
A S A M A T A R dot com.
And I'm Margaret Kiljoy and you can find me at

(25:22):
Birdsbefore Thestorm dot net. It's a website that I never obtained.
I don't know why I'm telling you to go there.
I have an author website. I've had it for a
very long time, but I don't use it. I am
on social media because I am not free. You can
find me at either Margaret or Magpie Kiljoy on various things.
I don't know. We search my name, you'll figure it out.
I believe in you, and I write a substack that
comes out every week. And I have another podcast it's

(25:44):
called Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. And also I
hope all of you are doing as well as you
can during this moment. I say this all the time,
but it's not like things are. It's always always a
complicated time, and that's why we have stories all right
by everyone.

Speaker 3 (26:02):
It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts you can
find sources for.

Speaker 1 (26:14):
It could happen here, Updated monthly at coolzonmedia dot com
slash sources.

Speaker 2 (26:19):
Thanks for listening,