About
I was born in Minneapolis, Minn., six months before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.
But my first childhood memories are of Guam island, where my father took a teaching job after receiving his Ph.D. It was a childhood of rocky beaches, skittering lizards and huge black-and-yellow spiders with webs that covered walls.
My parents moved to a suburb outside Chicago, then to a small mining town in the Appalachian Mountains, where for good and for ill I spend most of my formative years. I didn’t fit in there, had little love for the strip mines or the native sons who bullied me, but I did spend many wonderful hours in a well-stocked library on a hill across town. My father, yes, made me read The Lord of the Rings, his favorite book, and hiking down the paths that started there led me to H.P. Lovecraft and Ursula K. Le Guin, Harlan Ellison and T.S. Eliot, Roger Zelazny and Stephen King. For years I had a subscription to Asimov’s Science Fiction, which functioned as my window into the “glamorous” world of speculative fiction.
My family finally moved to Roanoke, Va., where I still live. In 1992, the year that Pope John Paul II forgave Galileo, I graduated from college, married Anita (nee Seth) and sold my first short story to a small press zine. Three years later, after earning my master’s degree (in creative writing, from Hollins University,) I made my first blip on the publishing radar by editing and printing New Dominions, a chapbook of stories and poems by Virginia writers such as Nelson S. Bond, Bud Webster, Paul Dellinger, Vickie Holt and R.H.W. Dillard (the title was a play on “The Old Dominion.”)
That rather humble hand-made anthology (I pasted the pages in order and trimmed and stapled the first edition myself) launched a number of things. Because of it, I met people who became lifelong friends and creative partners; it also led to years working as a submissions reader and freelance editor for DNA Publications, a genre house that produced such magazines as Aboriginal Science Fiction, Absolute Magnitude, Fantastic Stories and Weird Tales through the ’90s and early ’00s. It even played a role in landing me my newspaper job (I’ve been a writer of some form for The Roanoke Times since 1998.)
Anita and I now live in a house we call “Stone Oak Croft” among too-tall trees beneath a pestilence of squirrels. We co-exist with and occasionally serve the whims of two eccentric young cats, Persephone and Pandora, who use our goofy galumphing dog Loki as a pillow and play-toy, much to his consternation.
In my day job I’m the arts columnist for my city’s daily newspaper, but this website is all about what I do in my spare time. Here’s a list.
‣ Since 1998 I’ve been editor, (and since 2006 publisher) of the biannual poetry journal Mythic Delirium, a zine that’s published work by Neil Gaiman, Ursula K. Le Guin, Jane Yolen, Joe Haldeman, Catherynne M. Valente, Theodora Goss, Ian Watson, Sonya Taaffe, JoSelle Vanderhooft, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Jessica Paige Wick, Amal El-Mohtar, Samantha Henderson, Kendall Evans, Deborah P Kolodji, F.J. Bergmann, Erzebet YellowBoy Carr and many, many others. Four poems from our pages have gone on to win the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Rhysling Award for best speculative poem and reappear in the Science Fiction Writers of America’s Nebula Awards Showcase series.
‣ I’ve edited or co-edited several books, including The Alchemy of Stars (the anthology of all the poems which have won the Rhysling Award) the MYTHIC anthologies of fantasy poetry and fiction, and most recently the critically-acclaimed Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness anthology series for Norilana Books.
‣ Clockwork Phoenix in particular became the focus of a lot of genre community attention, with starred reviews in Publishers Weekly, and stories included on the Locus Recommended Reading List, reprinted in several Year’s Best anthologies and shortlisted for the Nebula, Shirley Jackson, and WSFA Small Press awards. Authors I’ve had the privilege to showcase include Tanith Lee, Catherynne M. Valente, Marie Brennan, John C. Wright, Mary Robinette Kowal, John Grant, Cat Rambo, Gregory Frost, Leah Bobet, Shweta Narayan, Saladin Ahmed, Gemma Files, Steve Rasnic Tem, Kelly Barnhill, Erin Hoffman, Laird Barron, Cat Sparks, Ekaterina Sedia, Joanna Galbraith, Vandana Singh, C.S.E. Cooney and Nicole Kornher-Stace.
‣ I’ve published five books of poetry: Strange Wisdoms of the Dead (Wildside Press, 2006), was a Philadelphia Inquirer Editor’s Choice selection; my latest, and my best, is The Journey to Kailash (Norilana Books, 2008). I’ve also had about 200 or so poems appear in venues like Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Pedestal Magazine, Nebula Awards Showcase, The Best Horror of the Year, Goblin Fruit, Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine and other places. I suppose I should mention I’m a former president of the Science Fiction Poetry Association (from 2004 to 2006) and also a three-time winner of the Rhysling Award.
‣ In 2004 I re-engaged a youthful fascination with the stage, and I can occasionally be spotted late Friday nights performing in Roanoke’s No Shame Theatre, often finding ways to convert my strange poems or stories into stranger stage skits. Several of these I’ve reprised at the Rhysling Awards Poetry Slan Reading at ReaderCon in Boston, which I’ve hosted since 2005. I’ve recorded readings of stories and poems, my own and others, for the Hugo Award-winning websites Clarkesworld and StarShipSofa. I’ve also, much to my own surprise, been asked to speak about, read and perform poetry in other venues, including the Library of Congress, the L.A. Festival of Books, the World Fantasy Convention, the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, and local institutions like Ferrum College and Hollins, my alma mater.
‣ I’ve also been a speaker on other topics. On April 19, 2008, I had the honor of being the keynote speaker at the dedication of The Nelson Bond Room at Marshall University. Later that same year I gave a 45-minute presentation about Nelson at the 2nd annual Roanoke Arts Festival that included snippets from his radio plays. And in a much quirkier turn, after the publication of my Lovecraftion short story “Her Acres of Pastoral Playground,” I gave a May 2010 presentation for Roanoke City Public Libraries titled “How H.P. Lovecraft Took Over the World.” A part of the libraries’ Emerging Artists series, the show included movie clips, recorded and live music, a skit and, of course, readings from the story.
‣ Over twenty-some years of doing all these other things, I’ve also cranked out the occasional short story. My fiction has appeared in Interzone, Weird Tales, Thaumatrope, Pseudopod, Podcastle, and anthologies as diverse as Cabinet des Fées (Prime Books, 2006, 2007), Sky Whales and Other Wonders (Norilana, 2009), Cthulhu’s Reign (DAW, 2010) and Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories (Torquere Press, 2011.) My horror story “The Button Bin” was a finalist for the 2008 Nebula Award for Best Short Story, and tends to keep resurfacing; most recently it’s manifested in the April 2011 issue of Apex Magazine.
Nowadays, despite an effort I made to prune back the projects I’m involved in, it seems I’ve wound up being as busy as ever. I’m an occasional guest blogger at Black Gate Magazine and a volunteer with the Interstitial Arts Foundation. I’m currently working on a novel, a dark and violent Appalachian Gothic based on my short story “The Hiker’s Tale” that novelist Jaime Lee Moyer has described after reading a draft as “an unholy marriage of The Chronicles of Amber and Twin Peaks.” Overall I’m focusing more on fiction and less on poetry — though the poems still seem to be coming anyway.
