NOT REALLY NEWS ANYMORE, BUT...

Yes, I've been on this for a while, but it you visited this site long ago, it's different. The credit (or blame) goes to Fr Gulligan. That is to say, me.

I was introduced to E T Ellison in 2001 by the late Paul Feathertree, founder of Wynderry Press. Where did this ET guy come from? I wondered. When Ellison's first novel, The Luck of Madonna 13, came out in very limited distribution, other people wondered the same thing.

Although the reviewers didn't necessarily agree on how to categorize this book (it has been labeled science fiction, fantasy and slipstream), the reviewers did agree on two things: the man has a wild imagination and the man can write. That quirky, innovative first novel earned some very fine kudos, particularly considering it was released with minimal exposure by an extremely tiny press that is now defunct. The ForeWord Magazine 2002 Science Fiction Book of the Year was its top honor, but it was also named to the January Magazine top 92 books of the year. Not bad.

While I admit to no particular slant toward any genre at all -- I like what I like, wherever I find it -- I asked ET where I could find his other writings in print. Nowhere: they're private, he said. He told me he learned about writing fiction by writing stories as gifts to family members, mostly. I nagged and he reluctantly shared a few. I nagged some more and he reluctantly shared a few more.

I thought many of these off-the-wall and often laugh-out-loud funny stories should be "out there." Ultimately ET agreed to let me have a section of his website where some could be presented...as long as I didn't take the project any more seriously than he takes those stories. Thus was Orphans Eleven created.

You can find these stories in the ZINE section.

Thank you for visiting.

Fr M Gulligan
Editor and Webmaster