The Coming of Spring by Madeline Todd | Other People’s Art

Meridian 52nd Edition cover art by Izzy Kern

In my experience, starting out as a Big Boy Writer has always felt like asking a huge favor from my friends and family—to be a lucrative artist is to have an audience, and to build an audience, you have to make one out of those around you. I don’t know, it just feels weird, right? Still, having more artists than not amongst my friends and family, I want to share their stuff just as much as I share mine, and start an occasional segment on Max Todd. (Dot Com!) with the spotlight on others’ art. Last Friday would’ve been the perfect time to start said segment, but since I got off track with blog scheduling, now will have to be the slightly-less-perfect time to start, because my sister, Madeline, just published her short story “The Coming of Spring” in the Meridian Creative Arts Journal!

You might know Madeline from her Book Review Tuesdays and Sunday Songs over on Madeline Todd (Dot Com!), but seeing as this is her first publication, you might not be familiar with her fiction writing. Though “The Coming Of Spring” leans more straightforwardly sci-fi than her found-family, space-opera sensibilities, this story is a really fantastic introduction to her style, and has me really excited for you guys to see what else she’s got coming down the line. From the get-go, “The Coming of Spring” has a lot of Madeline Todd hallmarks to offer—it’s got vibrant, DiTerlizzian aliens, indie-referential spaceships, and a crew of characters surrounding you, the second-person protagonist, colonizing a fertile new world. Madeline’s always been a proponent of what she calls “gentle sci-fi” in the same slice-of-life vein as Becky Chambers, but “The Coming of Spring” is a slow-burn thriller, through and through—it’s a story that I think will resonate with anyone who can be surrounded by optimism from a million different angles and still justify their own anxiety. I, personally, wouldn’t know anything about that, and boy, is the stove off? But anyway, I think that sort of hypothetical person would resonate with it. I remember being in the car with Madeline when she first pitched this story, and it’s really cool to see it flower to fruition like this in the same magazine I first published in this time last year. Go support Madeline and read “The Coming of Spring!”