The Fear of Monkeys - The Best E-Zine on the Web for Politically Conscious WritingRing-tailed Lemur - Issue Fifty
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Ring-tailed Lemur from Christiano Artuso The Ring-tailed Lemur is endemic to the island of Madagascar where they range from gallery forests to spiny scrub in the southern regions of the island. They are opportunistic omnivores, primarily eating from as many as three dozen different plant species, and their diet includes flowers, herbs, bark and sap, particularly from the tamarind tree. They have also been observed eating decayed wood, earth, spider webs, insect cocoons, arthropods (spiders, caterpillars, cicadas and grasshoppers) and small vertebrates such as birds and chameleons. They have a slender frame and narrow face, and their long, bushy tail is ringed in alternating between twelve or thirteen black and white transverse bands. Their coat varies from gray to rosy-brown, sometimes with a brown patch around the tail region. The hair on the throat, cheeks, and ears is white or off-white and also less dense, allowing the dark skin underneath to show through. They are relatively large, with their average weight at 2.2 kilograms and their body length ranging between 39 and 46 cm. The average troop contains 13 to 15 individuals and their home range size varies between 6 and 35 hectares. They are a female-dominant species, and females socially dominate males in all circumstances, including feeding priority. Dominance is enforced by lunging, chasing, cuffing, grabbing and biting. Although the females may seek outside males, they typically mate within their troop. Their breeding season runs from mid-April to mid-May and gestation lasts for about 135 days. The offspring are born in September or occasionally October. One offspring is the norm, although twins may occur. Due to their diurnal lifestyle, they also sunbathe; the lemurs can be observed sitting upright on their tails, exposing their soft, white belly fur towards the sun. They will often also have their palms open and eyes gently closed, as if meditating. Like other lemurs, this species relies strongly on their sense of smell, and territorial marking, with scent glands, provides communication signals throughout a group's home range. They use many different calls, including those which concern group cohesion and announce the presence of predators. Despite their relatively small brain they can organize sequences, understand basic arithmetic, and preferentially select tools based on functional qualities. Listed as endangered by the IUCN, only about 2,000 ring-tailed lemurs are estimated to be left in the wild in 2017, making the threat of their extinction serious. Their native predators include the fossa, the Madagascar harrier-hawk, the Madagascar buzzard, and the Madagascar ground boa. There are also introduced predators like the small Indian civet, the domestic cat and the domestic dog. As this suggests, they are mostly threatened by the actions of people, such as habitat destruction, the bushmeat and pet trades, and poaching for zoos.
   


The Last Issue of the Fear of Monkeys

by

Barry Pomeroy

Twenty-five years ago, I was looking for a literary journal or magazine which catered to didactic prose and poetry written with political intent. I was surprised to discover no journals existed which listed that as their specific intention. Instead, some literary journals accepted a few texts per issue which made gentle, class-centric critiques of society, and others-which were more expressly concerned with political matters-only featured more expository prose, such as essays and researched editorials.

Confronted with that concerning reality, I met with some friends to talk about a magazine which would provide a home for those texts which were deemed to be too political for the more timid journals, or too outrageous for those venues which catered to cautious creative-writing majors. I was reminded of Farley Mowat. A prolific Canadian writer and excellent prose stylist, his work was a kind of gonzo journalism before Hunter S. Thompson popularized the term. Mowat's politicized tracts and difficult-to-categorize novels and travel journals were never taught in university literature classes or seen as serious literature.

This is not to complain that the contemporaneous literary world is more restrictive or conservative than in Mowat's time, but rather to point to a kind of classism that exists in that rarefied setting. The journals which ignored Mowat's contributions would rather focus on more mundane middle-class prose stylists who were careful not to ruffle political feathers if they even had the inclination.

With these thoughts in mind, my friend put together a design for the website, and another friend offered the hosting, and the Fear of Monkeys was born. The name had its origin in a quote from my dissertation in which I argue that the movie-going public had missed the lesson of the original Planet of the Apes series, and instead had merely become terrified of primates. That quote and name informed the design, and each issue was dedicated to a particular primate, complete with a photo-many of them taken by another wildlife photographer friend-and enough information about the primate that anyone who became interested would know where to start their research.

From the beginning I intended to leave my name and that of others out of the zine, and instead focus on the writers we were featuring, and that meant the masthead of Fear of Monkeys remained anonymous regardless of who was reading submissions or who dealt with questions. It is only now, with this missive, that I reveal the depth of my involvement, and that is mostly meant to be as an elegy to the zine and to political writing in general.

The zine had a slow start, and in the first year or two I wondered whether there was enough interest to sustain it. Perhaps I'd been wrong about a writerly appreciation of the zine's theme. However, as the word passed, it developed its own inertia. After a few years, I was putting together three issues a year, and with the help of others who came and went, I waded through some hundred submissions a year. We generally accepted about fifteen percent of what was submitted, and we endeavoured to write a personal rejection, sometimes with more substantive criticism if that seemed warranted. We endeavoured to be as cordial as possible, bearing in mind what it means to a writer's ego to receive a rejection letter, and we also kept in mind that with submissions from around the world it was impossible to determine whether the person submitting was a novice writer, an established prima donna, or merely a child excited by the prospect of being a published writer.

I remember a several particular submissions, such as that from a young person who sent in a few photographs which looked like they'd been taken through the back window of a car descending an off-ramp. I wrote to them about how photography can tell stories, and recommended a few names of famous street photographers who we would be proud to display on our site. Another time an author demanded personal information about us-those who were working on the zine-as the price of their submission. Uncertain of their intentions, I merely told them they might be looking for something more from our small zine that we could provide. We were frequently subjected to the scatter-gun approach of writers who have little interest in looking through the terms of the magazine they target, and their addressing would include a long list of other magazines. That meant we read erotic poetry and love stories, as well as more literary stories concerning the petty travails of the upper classes, as we tried to ascertain whether they had read our mission statement.

More positively, there have been many returning authors. I like to think they had examined Fear of Monkeys' offerings from previous issues and had been looking for a place to show their work to the world. Some writers submitted several or even a dozen times over the years, and it was a pleasure to watch their voice develop-for the more novice writers-and for the more experienced authors, to see them begin to write specifically for a venue like Fear of Monkeys which gave them a place to experiment with more radical political statements.

Because I have been the main driving force behind Fear of Monkeys, with others coming and going as they found other interests, the decision on when to close our doors lay with me. I decided that, with website access becoming more difficult and my impending retirement, fifty issues made for a good round number. Although the literary world has changed little in the intervening decades, and Fear of Monkeys remains the lone zine devoted to works which are overtly political (please prove me wrong), I feel it is time to hand the banner to others who wish to take up the cause.

In our world we need creative writers taking on political topics even more than we did twenty years ago, we need their analysis, their acerbic commentary, and their holding of power to account, and I hope that someone will step up as I step down. I would have liked to see the modest success of Fear of Monkeys be repeated a hundredfold, but that remains merely a wish for now.

Thanks for supporting this project all these years, and for taking the time to submit your work to the faceless primate behind Fear of Monkeys, trusting to the ether that your work would be treated considerately and well.

Barry Pomeroy is a Canadian novelist, short story writer, academic, essayist, travel writer, and editor. He is primarily interested in science fiction, speculative science fiction, dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, although he has also written travelogues, poetry, book-length academic treatments, and more literary novels. His other interests range from astrophysics to materials science, from child-rearing to construction, from cognitive therapy to paleoanthropology. See barrypomeroy.com for more information.

 
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