Early Reviewers

The Children of Steel collection shows that engaging fiction of place is possible even for what some call less "scenic" places. But these places have heart! This collection is a way that people from steel mill communities share fiction based upon lives that they, their parents, and grandparents have known. In some of the stories in this collection, the steel mills are highlighted. In other stories, the mills may only be a constant part of the surroundings and a backdrop. But in all cases, these are stories that only can come from those with direct experience of being the children of steel. These contributions are from Jeff Manes, Joan Paylo, Kathy Bashaar, Karen Banks Pearson, Patrick Michael Finn, Sharon Hale Hotko, Curtis Mazzaferri, Barbara Dubos, Joseph S. Pete, Kurt Samano, John Szostek, Hardarshan Sing Valia, Connie Wachala, Alice Whittenburg, Stacy Alderman, Robert McKean, Phyllis Woods, Bianca Roman, Jane Ammeson, and Gloria Ptacek McMillan.

Gloria Ptacek McMillan, the Editor, was born and raised in East Chicago, Indiana. She received her MA in English from Indiana University and Ph.D. at University of Arizona. She has published three books: The Blue Maroon Murder, Orbiting Ray Bradbury’s Mars, and The Routledge Companion to Literature and Class. Her play Universe Symphony (about modernist composer Charles Ives) was performed at the Flandrau Planetarium in Tucson, Arizona. She leads a Zoom Tucson Hard-Science Science Fiction Group and writes articles to bring science into better communication with the arts and humanities. She has lived in Tucson since 1973 with her patient family (husband Bob and now Los Angeles-based son Chris). She visits Chicago and Northwest Indiana, sites of her steel mill town childhood.