Pet Names My Cats Might Call Me, If Cats Could Speak English

Pinky

My Big Hairless Pear

Boring Monstrosity

Flatface

Inedible Biped

Sissy

Doesn’t-Lick-Back

Pokey

Strictly Ornamental Nose

Depressed-y-Doodle

Leadfoot

Not-Worth-Killing

Foody

Little Things That Editors Hate

A while back, I talked in this blog about that moment when an editor is sitting there looking at two good poems or stories, but she only has room in the journal or anthology for one. She likes them both, but one of them has to get stuffed into its SASE and sent back to the minors. That’s a time when a few polished touches in your submission, like a straightforward bio and a non-scary cover letter, can tip the scale in your favor.

But there’s a dark side to this, and that’s where we’re going now. In my years as an editor, I’ve seen writers shoot themselves in the foot countless times with a bit of attitude or carelessness that probably seemed harmless when they did it, but turned into a deal-breaker when that submission was pitted against another. So, to give your work its best fighting chance out there in the literary trenches, here are a few little submission boners to avoid.

1. Don’t provide the editor with “helpful hints” on how to deal with your submission.

Cover letters can go so wrong, so fast. Sometimes writers get mixed up about who’s doing the writing and who’s doing the editing, and they feel compelled to tell the editor how to do her job. Even a hint of this sort of attitude can scare off an editor. Here are some examples, paraphrased from actual cover letters I’ve seen over the years.

“I think your readers will enjoy these poems.”

A lot of writers use this seemingly innocent phrase. It’s the equivalent of small talk at a cocktail party—I mean, you’ve got to say something to be polite, right? But this line instantly undermines the author’s credibility because it sounds both insincere and slightly arrogant. And it doesn’t say the writer has read the journal; in fact, it makes me suspect that he hasn’t. This writer is better off saying what he admires about the journal—the overall tone, or a poem he liked in a recent issue—proving he’s done his homework. If he hasn’t seen the journal (I don’t condone that, but I know it happens), he might mention something about its website or blog that he liked (because he probably looked at those when he was getting the guidelines). But if you can’t pull that off with honesty, just go the direct route: Avoid the chitchat, and wow the editor with your excellent poem or story.

“Please consider my story and, if you like it, feel free to edit it.”

This is another phrase that sounds sort of polite. But it implies that the author knows the story isn’t quite there—and also implants that idea in the editor’s head. Even worse: “Feel free to edit it down to your maximum length.” That just makes me scratch my head. I start thinking about those ballpoint pen refills that you can cut with a pair of scissors so they fit all kinds of different pens. Remember those? Messy. Inky. And what am I supposed to cut out of this story? The bad parts?

“I have not included an SASE because most publishers respond via e-mail and you should too.”

This is code for “Publish my piece, you stupid Luddite.”

“I have made my story just long enough to fit on three pages of your publication.”

OK, this one’s pretty rare, but it happens. And it’s sort of endearing. I mean, this author has counted up how many words (or, in my OCD fantasies, characters) fit on a page in my journal. And he’s done me the favor of editing it so I won’t have to touch it—it already fits! This puts me in mind of those “starving artist” sales, where you can buy an oil painting for that weird little phone alcove in your hallway, and another for the spot next to the bathroom sink—all for 50 bucks. Who cares what’s on them? They fit perfectly!

2. Don’t scatter your contact information all over your submission.

This one happens a lot. Keep in mind that, at some literary journals, the person who opens the mail is also the person who reads the submissions, at least in the first round. And while a good story or poem will trump any number of gaffes, it’s wise not to piss off this first reader by putting your name at the top of the cover letter, your phone number in the middle, and your e-mail address at the end. That poor editor is probably logging hundreds of entries into a database, and you’ll gum up the works by not making it easy for him. One time when I was logging in several hundred submissions, I found myself frequently barking the m—f word when people didn’t put their name and contact info in the upper left corner and the genre in the upper right, as they were asked to do in the guidelines. I spent hours logging those things in, and I got tired. Tired and mean. I’m just sayin’.

3. If there’s a postmark deadline, don’t mail your submission by Priority Mail, which costs a couple bucks more than First Class.

This is money down the drain. If it’s a postmark deadline, the journal or contest will build in a few extra days for the stragglers to come in—the envelopes that got wedged in the door of the mail truck or delayed by that storm in the Midwest. As long as your letter is postmarked by their deadline, you’re good. Priority Mail and its overnight kin—Express Mail, FedEx, etc.—all carry a hint of desperation and wastefulness that will make your editor a little uncomfortable right off the bat.

4. Don’t forget to include an SASE, or at least an e-mail address and phone number.

I know—who in the world forgets all of these things? It always surprises me, but it does happen sometimes. I can only assume it’s an accident, and I can’t get on my high horse about how stupid it is, because I’ve done some careless things when I was cranking out submissions in a hurry, like sending out simultaneous submissions when I didn’t mean to, and addressing letters to the wrong editor. But this gaffe is a heartbreaker because even if I love your work, I’ll have a hard time contacting you. And you’ll think I’m the world’s worst editor for not even having the decency to send you a rejection. Unhappy faces all around. When I used to kayak a lot, I kept a bonehead checklist by the door—paddle, life vest, and even boat—to keep me from arriving at the lake without the kayak or drowning myself out there. If you’re as forgetful as I am, a Post-It note next to your computer can save you a disaster or two.

5. Don’t use those big Tyvek, polyester, or spun-bonded envelopes that have to be cut open with a pair of scissors.

This is actually my number-one pet peeve about submissions. I hate, hate, hate those big, rip-resistant envelopes and their lumpy cousins, the yellow bubble envelopes. These inventions from hell make me put down the letter opener and sort through all the junk on my desk to find the scissors—which are always far, far away—just to open that one damned submission. You’d think this would only factor into the early envelope-opening, logging-in part of the process. But oh, no—I will remember that submission.

Honorable mentions:

6. Cigarette smell wafting out of the envelope.

7. Not putting enough postage on your submission so it arrives at the publisher with postage due.

8. “I wasn’t sure how many poems we could submit, so I sent both of mine.”
(I actually sort of love this one.)

Poem: Bair Island

Why eulogize
that great burnt plate,
hoary grey grasses
petrified with firework ash?
A nightmare of salt
and iodine, its gullies flash
in rust and ochre,
crystalline fur
like the pelt on a dried cat.
And the smell—
somewhere between
a lobster pot
and dead impatiens,
a wire brush in the mouth.

Next year they’ll break the dikes
and let the fish return.
How strange to mourn
this scarry land we walked
so many Sundays
when we loved
and gulped the brave air in,
our bootsoles marking
the old sea floor,
the new sea floor.





Posted for DVerse Poets’ Pub
Open Link Night #60
Hello, DVerse poets!

Jeff Tagami’s Rocket

Last night I was shocked to see poet Jeff Tagami’s name on the “In Memoriam” list in this month’s Poets & Writers. Jeff was only 57—in my estimation, about 50 years too young to die—when he succumbed to pancreatic cancer this past June. Jeff taught for many years at Cabrillo College and was known for his intimate, vivid poems about the people he grew up with, the farmworker community in and around Watsonville, California.

I met Jeff only once, but that meeting has stuck in my head ever since. It was about 15 years ago, at a writers’ conference where Jeff was teaching a workshop. I’d made an appointment for a one-on-one manuscript consultation with whatever poet was available, and had randomly drawn Jeff, whom I hadn’t heard of before that day. I brought in a few poems and nervously headed down a hall toward the room where we were to meet. Jeff—a boyish, soft-spoken man only a little older than I was—greeted me with the news that the room was occupied already, and we’d have to grab a couple of chairs and sit outside. We found a quiet spot under an overhang, and with the breeze riffling the papers in our hands, Jeff took a slow read through my poems. He made only a few comments; he thought they were basically good to go and didn’t want to steer me off in the wrong direction just for the sake of saying something. That was fine, I said, because what I really wanted to ask him was, “Where do I go from here?” I’d had a few poems published in decent literary journals, I told him, but I was feeling like Sisyphus rolling that rock—it seemed like every time I got some momentum going, the whole machine stopped and I had to go back to sending stuff out and getting rejected again and again. I asked him, does this ever get any easier?

Jeff laughed and said, well, maybe a little. At some point, some journals may start soliciting work from you, which is a good thing, and which will feel like the tide is turning. But there’s no guarantee that you won’t have to go back to doing the same hard work you’re doing now, and you might have to do it for a long time. Then he said the thing that has stuck in my mind all these years:

A writer’s career is like a rocket, he said. You hope it soars and goes great places, but you have to get it off the ground first. Too many times, he’d seen writers build and build and build their launch pad—which everybody has to do—only to give up, frustrated and exhausted, just before their rocket was about to ignite. They’d done the workshopping, they’d read the work of other poets, they’d attended the readings and networked with other writers, they’d researched literary journals and book publishers. They wrote good poems, got some work out there—and then got rejected the usual hundreds of times and just couldn’t deal with it. It was bloody hard work, and they gave up when they actually had something good going there.

That’s the key, he said: You can’t launch the rocket without building the launch pad.

I think about Jeff and that launch pad all the time. Obviously he did pretty well with his—there he was, mentioned in Poets & Writers on that sad memorial list, along with the likes of Ray Bradbury and Gore Vidal. And as a teacher—well, all you can hope for is that your students will remember you for all the right reasons. And I certainly remember Jeff.

Here are links to some of Jeff’s work:

“My Father Takes to the Road” and “Song of Pajaro”

Review of his book October Light* at the Poetry Foundation.

*October Light is out of print and goes for a fortune on Amazon. So if you see it at a used book store, grab it.

Little Things That Editors Love

A while back, I was talking with my friend, the poet Amy MacLennan, about an odd topic. We’ve both been reader/editors for literary journals and publishers, which means we’ve both spent many hours wading through piles of submissions, logging them in and sorting them into the Yes pile, the No pile, and the Maybe pile. The odd topic was this: Once in a while, a moment comes around when an editor is sitting there with two poems or short stories, both of which she likes, but only one of which she can accept. Maybe the fiction anthology is down to its last slot, or there’s room for one two-page poem, but not two. What will sway this editor to pick one piece of writing over another when, for all practical purposes, they’re equally good?

This is when little things become important—strange little things that an editor starts to notice when she’s read 300 submissions in a row. Picking one piece over another at this point may be a very unscientific process, one that boils down to a bit of charm, or a small annoyance, that the writer inadvertently sprinkled into his or her submission. Every editor’s different, and there’s no accounting for pet peeves. But let’s assume that I’m sitting there with two pieces of writing in my hands—one yours, and one that’s somebody else’s. Assuming that both of them feature stellar craft and suit my taste, what little things can you do in your submission that will make me root for you?

1. Surprise me.

By “surprise,” I don’t mean put a cockroach in the envelope, or tack another bloody O. Henry ending onto your short story. (Don’t get me started on O. Henry abuse.) The kind of surprise I like is, for instance, a sonnet that startles me with its gorgeous language set against an unusual topic—say, hospital food or safety deposit boxes. Or a short story that’s in the form of an accident report or a shopping list. This is the kind of jolt that lifts one good poem or story over another good one, a certain transcendence that makes an editor feel like she’s discovering truly inventive writing, perhaps even changing the course of literature. What editor doesn’t want that?

2. Include a short, straightforward bio with a few decent credentials and nothing cutesy.

Notice that this has nothing to do with your story or poem; this is all about the cover letter. Even if you have no publishing credits whatsoever, this is where you play it straight and say that you’re a stay-at-home mom or retired plumber or whatever, and maybe you’ve taken a few creative writing classes. If you have good credits—well-known literary journals, or small ones—list three to five of them*, and maybe a contest or two that you won, a degree you earned, or somebody famous you studied with, and keep it around 50 words. That’s it—no soliloquies, and no jokes. Humor in your story or poem is fine, but humor in a cover letter is like target-shooting in a strange, dark room—you’ll probably miss, and things will just go wildly wrong from there. If you’re a writer who likes mantras, here’s one for the cover letter: Do not scare off the editor.

3. Keep your cover letter simple.

This goes hand in hand with the short, straightforward bio, but it encompasses the entire look of your cover letter. When I was reading submissions for an anthology a while back, I was surprised at how annoyed I got with the overdecorated cover letters. I saw all sorts, from big splashy author logos to pastel photos of ripply lakes and aphorisms about dancing in the rain. All of those things qualify as too much information. I’m a sucker for elegant touches, like bullet points between the state and zip code, or the little telephone icon before a phone number. But after seeing so many methed-up cover letters, I’m leaning more and more toward the humble, plain-Jane variety, with the writer’s name and address at the top left-hand corner in the same font as the rest of the letter. (Needless to say, avoid frou-frou fonts, or the kind that a former co-worker called “too fontsy.”) The main attraction should be your poem or story; for the cover letter, the only rule of thumb is that it should not be distracting. If it does come down to you and that other author, don’t make the editor think, “Hmm…the one with the neutral cover letter that doesn’t say much, or the crazy teddy-bear lady?”

4. Just send one or two entries. Not twenty. Not fifty.

One exception to this: It might actually be OK to send twenty or fifty entries in to a contest. You have to pay for every one, so you’ll be helping them keep the contest going, and that’s not a bad thing. But if you’ve got twenty genuinely good stories or poems, they’ll do better work for you if you spread them around rather than putting all your literary eggs in one basket. And if you’re submitting to a journal or anthology—well, let’s just say that when an editor sees thirty-eight identical envelopes in the mail bin, he probably won’t be thinking, “I bet I’ll love this person’s work and will be thrilled to read every one of these!” Again, editor-ay, no air-scay.

5. Do any of the following, some of which are completely out of your control:

Be a little kid.

I love getting submissions from kids. I don’t care if the story is wildly inappropriate for our publication; these small people with their hand-scrawled cover letters and drawings of their hamsters just kill me. That’s not to say that I’ll accept the piece. But I will send the nicest rejection letter you ever got.

Be one of many people from your small town who sent in a submission.

I love this too. I’m fascinated by the little batches of envelopes that come in from the same tiny town in Kansas or Manitoba or wherever. Obviously these people know each other; they’re probably in a workshop or night class together. And because I’ve been in those workshops and classes where we all ganged up and tried for the same publications, and then laughed about it over coffee later, I’m instantly on your side. Bonus points if you’re from the same family.

Hail from an exotic-sounding place.

This is completely immature on my part, but I will give you a slight edge if you live someplace that sounds really cool, like Black Kitten Road or Woolgoolga, Australia.

Next up: There’s a flip side to this, of course. What dog-doodies should you avoid to keep your work out of the rejection pile? Stay tuned…

* Bonus pet peeve: authors who list every place they’ve ever been published, complete with the title of each poem or story, in a big honkin’ paragraph.

Photo by Niklas Bildhauer

Olympics, Week 1: The Good, the Bad, and the Rest of the World

Like a lot of people, I spent this past week glued to the TV, soaking up the Olympics. For me, it’s been an early-morning thing, hanging out on NBC’s “other” stations, the ones on channel eleventy-twelve that cover the sports I never see anywhere else, like archery and team handball and trampoline. As always, the Olympics are expanding my view of what’s cool, what’s possible, and what’s too freakin’ hard for me to ever try. But it hasn’t been all fun and Games. With all due respect to our talented American athletes, NBC is once again dedicating pretty much all of its prime-time coverage to them, while snubbing the rest of the world. And it’s a big world, with a lot of great Olympians—Olympians we will never get to know, thanks to NBC’s jingoistic journalism. But more about that later. First, the good stuff.

Cough, gag, sputter…gooooooooooal!!!!!

My favorite sport this week has been water polo. It’s just flat-out brutal, with more pummeling than taekwando and more dirty hits than hockey. The whole premise is crazy: You’re trying to throw a ball into a net while someone is trying to drown you. On the surface, it looks benign—a lot of bobbing heads and a few arms in the air—but the real action is happening under the water, where you can’t see it. Then they show the replay on the underwater camera and—holy cannoli, it’s a war zone down there, with all the shoving and gouging, kicking and grabbing and people pushing each other’s heads underwater. The women are even more vicious than the men because their swimsuits have more fabric, giving them convenient handles to drag each other down to their doom. I can’t get enough of this sport. It’s like roller derby with asphyxiation.

Ah, sweet mystery of fencing

I love watching fencing, but no matter how many times I see it, I do not understand it. Even when they super-slo-mo the replays, I can’t tell who’s stabbing whom. But I’ve decided that a fencing match is like a poem: Just because I don’t get it doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy it. I like the contrasting styles of foil, sabre and épée—some are thrusty, others are slashy, and that’s about as technical as I can get because, again, I do not understand this sport. And that’s fine. Everything happens in a split second, all aggression and forward momentum, all speed and snorting and shouting*. I especially love the fencers’ footwork, how steady and balanced they are, as if nothing could ever knock them over. It’s a welcome respite from gymnastics, where everybody seems about to fall down and crack their heads open.

The best worst day of your life

Speaking of gymnastics, when those fabulous American girls** won the team title and the Russian girls were crying their eyes out, I found myself wondering how many of them, on both teams, threw their guts up before the competition or felt like crap the whole day because they were so nervous. Watching the Olympics is like seeing hundreds of brides on their wedding day, and I don’t mean just the women—most of these athletes are more stressed out than they’ve ever been in their lives, with no sleep and bags under their eyes and wacked-out blood sugar. I guess that’s what separates the champions from everybody else: The best athletes know how to come out on a really bad day and look great in spite of it.

The other Olympians

Years ago, I was watching the winter Olympics late one night when I saw a figure skater who was way, way back in the pack—in 30th place or something—skating her long program. She was having a horrible night; she fell again and again, but she kept getting up and skating. By the time her routine was over, she looked exhausted and her legs were hatchmarked with thin, bleeding cuts from falling so many times on the ice. It was one of the saddest and most sobering things I’ve ever seen, but also one of the most real. Wow, I thought, figure skating is f***ing hard. I don’t remember her name, but I sure remember her, trying to do this almost impossible thing in front of millions of TV viewers and just having a hell of a time. At this year’s Olympics, there must be hundreds of athletes like her—not dazzling the crowd with their world records, but just scratching their way through these extremely difficult sports. I would like to see those athletes. We have a kajillion cable channels, so why can’t we see every athlete, in every sport, on TV? And NBC’s live online streaming thing doesn’t count; my Podunk-town cable provider isn’t on their list.

Patriotism, racism, or just business as usual?

I don’t have a scientific count here, but during NBC’s prime-time broadcasts, I haven’t seen a single “up close and personal” bio—or even a post-race poolside interview—with a nonwhite, non-U.S. athlete. A few Brits and Aussies, yes, but I’m continually amazed that the commentator sticks a microphone in the face of the American swimmer who came in fifth, when there’s a perfectly good Asian swimmer right there who just won a medal and is having the best day of her life, and probably speaks English. It wasn’t always this way; I remember lots of little bios in past Olympics featuring athletes from other countries, including many who didn’t end up winning bupkus. We got to see where they lived and trained, got to meet their families and dogs and hear about the obstacles they faced on their long journey to the Olympics. But this year, nada—it’s like athletes from other countries exist only as backdrops for Americans. Perhaps NBC is feeling the pinch, as we all are, and it’s too expensive to rustle up a translator or go do those overseas interviews. But I get the creeping feeling that NBC is holding the rest of the world at arm’s length for a reason. I see this particularly when NBC commentators talk about Chinese athletes: There’s a hint of disdain and fear in their voices, an unwillingness to get close enough to see them as people, as if they want us to think that China is cranking out so many cookie-cutter automatons, inhuman in their perfection. Is NBC is too lazy or cash-strapped or too—what, racist?—to get any closer than that? Or is it just a business strategy? After all, General Electric owns 49% of NBC, and as a leading defense contractor, GE does not have the purest intentions when it comes to promoting harmony between nations. The whole system feels wrong, tragically short sighted and clattering with conflicts of interest. We’ll see how the next week plays out—track and field is full of great foreign athletes—but I don’t hold out much hope for change. So I’ll probably head back to the eleventy-twelve stations where they show all those “other” sports, the ones where the rest of the world kicks ass…and wows me every morning.

* In contrast, archery and shooting are very Zen sports where commentators talk about relaxation and “letting it happen,” and the arrow or bullet’s flight is at the mercy of everything from the wind to the rotation of the Earth. All three—fencing, archery, and shooting—are beautiful, strange competitions that all simulate murder.

** I know we’re supposed to call it Women’s Gymnastics, but come on—only one of the Americans was even 18. These are little girls. Little girls who could break me like a toothpick.

A Town Like Eureka

I am in mourning. After five seasons, my favorite TV show, Eureka, has called it quits. This funny, smart series about an odd little Northwest town where science-y stuff happens is heading off to Netflixland.

     But in a way, I’ll always have Eureka—and not just because I’m greedily amassing all the seasons on DVD. The connection goes deeper than that. The truth is, I sort of live in Eureka. I realized this the other day while I was driving through my own little Northwest town of Ashland, Oregon. At a stoplight, I spotted a strange sight: two teenage boys springing across the street on futuristic, curved stilts, looking like creatures from Star Wars. It was surreal, but honestly, it wasn’t all that surprising. We have a saying here: “That’s so Ashland.” This is a town where odd stuff—usually fun, often artistic, and sometimes science-y—happens. And one of the reasons why I like Eureka so much is because the fictitious town of Eureka reminds me of Ashland. I mean, a lot—so much so that I often wonder if the show’s creators, Andrew Cosby and Jaime Paglia, spent their vacations here, lazing around Lithia Park or doodling on their iPads in one of our homey cafés. The show is set in Oregon, and some footage was actually shot here in Ashland*. But there’s more to it; the two towns really are eerily alike. For instance…

Sheriff Carter arrives in Eureka after he wrecks his car while swerving to avoid a loose dog.

This happens in Eureka’s pilot, and it touches on two recurrent themes in Ashland: People who wind up here because of accidents, and loose dogs wandering the streets. I can’t tell you how people have told me that they were just driving past Ashland on their way to someplace else when something went terribly wrong with their fuel pump or transmission or whatever. They had to stay a few days…and never left. And now (10 years later, 30 years later), they’re still here and they never want to leave.

     And then there are the wandering dogs. When I first moved to Ashland, I was in a constant state of panic over the number of dogs meandering around town alone. In the Bay Area, where I’d just come from, a loose dog is an emergency, sure to get hit by a car. But I eventually found that in Ashland, where the speed limit is generally 25 mph, a lot of people walk their dogs off leash and let them wander far ahead or behind. So you often see dogs that appear to be roaming free, when in fact the owner is just around the corner. I don’t condone it, but that’s the way it is here. The phenomenon is so common that that I’ve come to call it the Daily Loose Dog.

People in Eureka have futuristic vehicles, like electric cars and Segways.

People in Ashland do too. I’ve never seen so many electric cars in my life, everything from kit-bash golf carts to SmartCars to Priuses. I’m constantly reminded of what Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear says about electric cars: that they’re a menace to pedestrians because you can’t hear them coming. It’s actually true. And Segways, those geeky two-wheely things made famous by Paul Blart: Mall Cop—we had those ambling up and down our bike lanes long before Kevin James climbed aboard one. Just the other day, I saw a cop on a Segway wheeling up a trail in Lithia Park. And an even more futuristic-looking ride, Glide Cycles, are made right here in Ashland. They’re an eerie sight—if you can’t see the rider’s feet (which are running smoothly along the ground), all you see is an arc of metal with a person dangling in the middle, whizzing down the path. I’m using Jamie Lusch’s photo from a news article here, which I hope I don’t get dinged for; you sort have to see a Glide Cycle to get it.

On the outskirts of Eureka stands a shadowy government facility.

Hey, we have one of those, too. It’s called the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Forensics Laboratory. But unlike Eureka’s General Dynamics, which is shadowy and secretive because it makes weapons and strange inventions, our own Forensics Lab is shadowy because it’s in the business of fighting bad guys. In fact, according to its website, it is “the only lab in the world dedicated to crimes against wildlife.” Their noble work—examining the remains of animals and putting poachers out of business—is, like other real-life CSI jobs, more grim than glamorous. But, like General Dynamics, the Forensics Lab takes government money and puts it to astoundingly good use. (And you’ve got to admire any collection of scientists who work with Interpol.)

There’s something in the water. 

On Eureka, a lot of episodes revolve around some strange chemical getting into the air or water, turning townspeople into zombies or savages or drunken nitwits. In Ashland you hear a lot of running jokes about this, stemming from a persistent rumor that the tap water contains traces of lithium, a drug used to treat bipolar disease. There’s a grain of truth to it: A lithium spring bubbles out of the ground near Emigrant Creek, a few miles from downtown, and you can sip piped-in “lithia water” (which tastes like Alka-Seltzer and eggs) from a couple of fountains in and near Lithia Park. I don’t know if any of the lithium ever leaches into in our drinking water—and I’m sure the city would vehemently deny it—but people are weirdly happy here. It’s a bit Stepfordian at first…but after a while, you’re just as smiley as everybody else and you don’t care anymore. Which I guess should be a clue.

*Eureka used footage of Ashland’s City Hall to stand in for a street scene in the “Primal” episode. (For fans of the show, that’s the one with all the Nathan Starks). Don’t blink—the footage goes by fast. You can spot City Hall by its green awnings.