DESCENT INTO LIGHT

Congratulations to poet Sofía Rhei (and translator Lawrence Schimel) whose poem “The Magic Walnut” from Mythic Delirium 25 is a contender for the 2012 Dwarf Stars Awards.

(I’ve mentioned earlier that my own poem co-written with Anita, “Unland, Unlife,” is also in the running, along with many other worthies. May the best poem win!)

I learned last night that my poem “Unland, Unlife,” co-written with Anita, has been selected to be one of the contenders for the 2012 Dwarf Stars Award. This is the first time we’ve been up for a writing award for something we’ve composed together. Way cool!

One of the surprise delights of ReaderCon this past weekend was learning via word of mouth that my buddy Shira Lipkin had won the 2012 Rhysling Award for short poem with her surreal prose piece “The Library, After,” which I published in Mythic Delirium 24. Shira ended up giving a reading of the poem during my Sunday morning workshop.

She describes how this poem came to be on her website. Excerpts below:

I originally wrote “The Library, After” at the very end of 2008 … I started reading it at conventions – I tend to prefer to read flash and poetry, because it keeps a reading moving, switching gears. It built a small following. … I had such affection for this story that, when I attended the Meet the Pros(e) party at Readercon 2009 (writers get one line from their work printed up on stickers and share it with people, creating a sort of absurdist poetry as you collect other people’s lines), I used a line from it: “Awakened, the library went feral.” I bounced up to Mythic Delirium editor Mike Allen and traded lines with him, and he said “Where is this from?” and then, “Has it been published?”

I sent him the story. And proceeded to forget that I’d ever done so. It was too short for his Clockwork Phoenix anthology series, and Mythic Delirium is a poetry magazine, so I was expecting nothing except that hopefully he’d enjoy it. But he ended up e-mailing me and asking if he could buy it for Mythic Delirium.

But – it’s not a poem, I said.

It’s poetic, he said.

Okay.

Illustration for "The Library, After" by Paula Friedlander

I’m pleased to add that this is now the fifth poem from Mythic Delirium to land a Rhysling Award. Here’s the complete list (with links):

• “Octavia Is Lost in the Hall of Masks,” Theodora Goss, 2004

• “Eating Light,” F.J. Bergmann, 2008

• “Song for an Ancient City,” Amal El-Mohtar, 2009

• “In the Astronaut Asylum,” Kendall Evans and Samantha Henderson, 2010

• “The Library, After,” Shira Lipkin, 2012

Three months later than I originally planned, I’ve finished converting Clockwork Phoenix 2: More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness to e-book format. It’s available now on Amazon for Kindle and will soon be available in EPUB and MOBI format at Weightless Books.

Between reacquainting myself with the Clockwork Phoenix books and some of the reprint sales I’ve made it seems like I’ve spent much of the past four months walking down memory lane. This stretch is particularly gilded: it’s a bit mind-boggling to me how well this book and these stories wound up doing. To enumerate:

• • Overall, first starred review in Publishers Weekly for a Norilana Book (and for anything I’ve put together.)
• • “Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela” by Saladin Ahmed was a 2009 Nebula Award finalist, picked for reprinting in Nebula Awards Showcase 2011 and Hartwell and Cramer’s Year’s Best Fantasy 10.
• • “each thing i show you is a piece of my death” by Gemma Files and Stephen J. Barringer was a finalist for the 2010 Shirley Jackson Awards and the 2010 WSFA Small Press Award for Short Fiction and was reprinted in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year 2.
• • Ann Leckie’s “The Endangered Camp” was reprinted in Horton’s Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2010.
  Claude Lalumière’s “Three Friends” was also selected by Hartwell and Cramer for Year’s Best Fantasy 10.
• • Tanithe Lee’s “The Pain of Glass” and Gemma and Stephen’s novelette made the 2009 Locus Magazine Recommended Reading List.
• • Gardner Dozois, in his Year’s Best Science Fiction 27, gave honorable mentions to Kelly Barnhill’s “Open the Door and the Light Poors Through,” Leah Bobet’s “Six,” Marie Brennan’s “Once a Goddess,” Mary Robinette Kowal’s “At the Edge of Dying,” Barbara Krasnoff’s “Rosemary, That’s For Remembrance,” Ann’s story, and Claude’s, Tanith’s, and Gemma and Stephen’s novelettes. That’s well over half the book!
• • Datlow, in her extended Honorable Mentions list for that year, gave nods to Ian McHugh’s “Angel Dust” and Barbara’s short story.

If there’s anything else (whew!) I don’t remember it right now….

This review of the anthology by Amal El-Mohtar remains my personal favorite. I’m glad to book this “choir of the uncanny” for performances in a new venue.

P.S.: It occurs to me that I should link to the first volume too!

Some nice recognitions for my poetry over the past few days.

First, the poem that I co-wrote with Sonya Taaffe and Nicole Kornher-Stace, “The King of Cats, the Queen of Wolves,” selected by Catherynne M. Valente for publication in Apex Magazine last year, has been nominated for a Rhysling Award. I can’t help but be pleased, as of all the new things I had published in 2011 this piece is hands-down my favorite.

Second, the Fantasy Literature blog has posted a review of Phantasmagorium issue 2, and bless Terry Weyna for once again taking the time to also review the poetry, a duty most reviewers shirk. She writes this about my poem “Budding”:

…about parents troubled by the apparent artistic talent of their baby, who seems to be painting like Francis Bacon while still in her crib. Those parents are proud as can be, but worried – maybe even scared. It’s a successful horror poem with some nice imagery (“sketched houses with screams for doors,” for instance).

I’m proud to be able to announce that two stories from Clockwork Phoenix 2: More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness are going to be included in David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer’s Year’s Best Fantasy 10, forthcoming from Tor.com.

They are the novelette that opens the anthology, “Three Friends” by Claude Lalumière, and Saladin Ahmed’s Nebula Award-nominated “Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela.” Congratulations, guys!

This is, of course, the perfect excuse for me to mention (again) that I’ll be bringing Clockwork Phoenix 2 out as an e-book under my Mythic Delirium Books imprint next month, and that the first volume of Clockwork Phoenix is available now in e-format at Amazon.com and from Weightless Books.

Congratulations to these poets with work from Mythic Delirium in contention for the 2011 Rhysling Awards:

short poem category

• Jennifer Crow, “We Took Our Gods”, Issue 21, January 2010
• Lyn C. A. Gardner, “Midnight Posture”, Issue 23, Summer/Fall 2010
• Shweta Narayan, “Cave-smell”, Issue 22, Winter/Spring 2010
• Jane Yolen, “The Gospel of the Rope”, Issue 23, Summer-Fall, 2010.

long poem category

• F. J. Bergmann, “Occidental”, Issue 23, Summer-Fall 2010
• C. S. E. Cooney, “Ere One Can Say It Lightens”, Issue 22, Winter/Spring 2010
• Joshua Gage, “Rats”, Issue 22, Winter/Spring 2010
• Jaime Lee Moyer, “Rain Face”, Issue 21, January 2010
• Catherynne M. Valente, “Red Engines”, Issue 21, January 2010

Swiped from the original post at The Plasteel Spider Factory.