Surprise poetry sales

/ Friday, December 30th, 2011 / No Comments »

Earlier this week I was contacted out of the blue by Denmark denizen Knud Larn, the editor of an old school sf fanzine called Fandom Forever, distributed by the Fantasy Amateur Press Association. “There is too little poetry in fanzines nowadays,” he said, made a nice offer and asked if I would contribute a new poem and four reprints. And so, I’m pleased to report that my poem “A Prayer,” a part of the “Claire-dare” series from 2010, will be appearing in Larn’s next issue, due out Feb. 1 (my birthday!) He’s also reprinting my sf-tinged poems “Strange Cargo,” “retrovirus,” “Tithonus on the Shore of Ocean” and “Charon Finds a Woman on the Gridshore,” specifically the “preferred text” versions from my 2008 collection The Journey to Kailash.

I’ve had another long term “surprise sale” recently come to a conclusion just this past Monday. Back in May I read my poem “Sisyphus Crawls” (another Claire-dare piece, now available in the latest issue of Fantastique Unfettered) aloud to the audience at No Shame Theatre here in Roanoke. Afterward a fellow named Luke Davis approached me and told me he liked the poem so much he’d happily pay me for a hand-written, framed version of it.

It took me a long time to get around to doing this. Part of it was all the work I was doing rewriting my first novel. Part of it was that, though I have a vestigial visual arts background — I started college as an art major, didn’t figure out writing was what really interested me more than anything else until my senior year — creating this piece was something now so far outside my usual paradigm that I couldn’t quite get my mind around it.

But I finally made it happen:

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