DESCENT INTO LIGHT

A new issue of Goblin Fruit is always a reason to celebrate. And I’m delighted that this issue’s guest artist is none other than longtime Mythic Delirium contributor Paula Friedlander.

Goblin Fruit co-editor Amal El-Mohtar is also a contributor to the latest issue of Mythic Delirium, and received her copy in time to pose the two newborn issues together. Note that by coincidence (or is it?) they are color coordinated.

The ReaderCon cup (also black and red on white) is not insignificant: ReaderCon is where we’ve held joint readings of our two venues and hope to hold a celebration of mythic poetry this year. Well done, Miss Amal.

I have been through many a cringe-inducing conversation in my life wherein someone identifies themselves to me as a fellow published poet, and then reveals that they were published by the National Library of Poetry, one of the most infamous scams in recent publishing history. It appears a company is using the old NLoP website, Poetry.com, to attempt to stage a comeback. Writer Beware has more details.

I feel the need to once again exhibit one of my prize possessions. I once sent in an obvious joke poem to this company just to prove that everyone became a “semi-finalist,” regardless of what they submitted, and were then asked to pay a steep price for the privilege of seeing their work in print. Here, once again, is the scan of the envelope I received after I submitted, with the poem all prettily typeset in the display window:

At one time, this poem was actually available on Poetry.com (even though I never responded to their offer) before someone apparently noticed my postings about it and removed it.

I’m very pleased to be able to announce the publication of my new short story “Twa Sisters.” It’s a highly experimental science fictional lark that came together from several different point of origin.

The most important threads in the weave come from two places. First, Patty Templeton pointed me at the collages of Italian artist Alessandro Bavari. Second, Nicole Kornher-Stace challenged me to try to write a story they way I write poems. She meant using the same language I use in poetry, but what actually happened was I wound up using the same visual trickery I sometimes experiment with in poems, such as parallel columns of text. I’ve written many poems inspired by artwork, and so I turned to Bavari’s work to draw inspiration for the story’s setting. The result piles strangeness on strangeness; it was a pleasant shock to have “Twa Sisters” find a home as quickly as it did, as it pushes limits in all directions as far as I’ve ever pushed them.

What follows is Not One of Us editor John Benson’s complete statement about the new issue, which looks pretty scrumptious overall.

Announcing Not One of Us 47

In this, our latest issue, things are not as they seem. We have walls with voices and zoos with mirrors, living dead and sex with ghosts, breasts with blue hair and beasts not quite unicorns, the dead as comfort in despair and angels as messengers of doom, health for the waiting and a secretly shared cortex.

Contents:

The Glass Presence, by Daniel Kaysen
Classroom Wall, with Voice (poem), by Lucas Strough
The Living Dead (poem), by Amanda C. Davis
When the Blue Hairs Grow, by Patricia Russo
Reiselied (poem), by Sonya Taaffe
Here at the End of All Things, by Francesca Forrest
Twa Sisters, by Mike Allen
The Hero’s Journey (poem), by Sonya Taaffe
Universal Engines (for Christopher Morcom) (poem), by Jeannelle Ferreira
Dr. Crow (poem), by Jeff Jeppesen
The Waiting, by A.A. Garrison
Black Molly (poem), by Marigny Michel
Art: John Stanton

Not One of Us #47 will be available from Chris Drumm Books, or you can order a copy or subscription right now directly from me .

We’ll be mailing the contributors’ and subscribers’ copies this week.

As I continue to work on my Secret Second Novel, a number of cool things sort of accumulated all at once. I shall enumerate them here.

I have a new poem, “Surcease,” out in Issue 3 of the recently-revived Inkscrawl, edited by Samantha Henderson, published by Rose Lemberg. Inkscrawl specializes in poems of 10 lines or less. Lots of other good work in this one too, by Mari Ness, Alexa Seidel, Howard Hendrix, Kristine Ong Muslim, Ann K. Schwader and more.

My newest “Tour of the Abattoir” column has appeared in the latest Tales to Terrify podcast. This month, my friend Shalon Hurlbert and I dissect an obscure almost-gem, the bizarre J-horror flick Marebito, from Ju-On: The Grudge creator Takashi Shimizu.

Over at StarShipSofa, the sister podcast of TtT, Diane Severson’s latest edition of Poetry Planet features a Rhysling Award-nominated poem, “TimeFlood,” that I co-wrote with Ian Watson. Gardner Dozois bought it for Asimov’s not long before he retired from that editing post. The poem’s part of an ensemble focused on time travel.

Back to Rose Lemberg again, my tiny contribution to Issue 7 of her webzine Stone Telling, called the “Queer Issue” and dedicated to LGBT themes, involves playing the role of “Abe” in the audio recording of Lisa Bradley’s epic meta-horror poem “we come together we fall apart.” It’s a powerful issue overall, I’m flattered to have a bit part in it.

Not to be found online: I’ve just received my copy of the Danish sf fanzine Fandom Forever — it’s a seriously old-school DIY zine — which contains my poem “A Prayer,” as well as four reprinted poems: “Strange Cargo,” “Tithonus on the Shore of Ocean,” “Charon Finds a Woman on the Gridshore” and “retrovirus.” The issue also holds work by Tobias S. Buckell, Peter Payack, Bruce Boston and  Lavie Tidhar.

Extra bonus: There’s been a special illustrated poster made of Neil Gaiman’s poem “Conjunctions,” which I first published in Mythic Delirium issue 20 — and Neil autographed a copy for me and had it sent to me. And I got it today and am now basking in the glow. (The art you see along the left is an image of the poster.)

The latest of Larry Santoro’s Tales to Terrify podcasts includes my second “Tour of the Abattoir” column, in which I join the voices calling for a change in the World Fantasy Award statuette and give John Langan’s debut collection Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters the abattoir treatment. Also included, fiction by P.D. Cacek and John Everson.

Tales to Terrify is the new sister podcast to StarShipSofa, focused exclusively on horror.

Madman Tony C. Smith invited me to contribute a monthly column to Tales to Terrify. I just finished recording the first installment. I’m calling it “Tour of the Abattoir.” Said abattoir being my brain, as many of the characters from my stories could attest.

I hope folks enjoy it. I’m also grateful that Tony is a patient madman because (ulp!) it’s two weeks late…

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:

As part of my rather complex leap into the e-book breach, I’ve mentioned that I plan to release a small collection of my previously published horror stories.

Toward that end, paper cutout artist and frequent Mythic Delirium contributor Paula Friedlander made this for me after reading the stories I plan to include:

I think what Paula does is fascinating — and that it’s also easy to be fooled into think she’s working in ink. So I’m including a few details in this post, just to give you a better idea:

My thanks to Steve Breeding for aiming this at me.

I’m pleased to announce that Erzebet Yellowboy Carr of Papaveria Press plans next year to create a limited (18-copy) special edition of “The Quiltmaker,” my novella that’s a direct sequel to my Nebula Award-nominated horror story “The Button Bin.”

And she’ll be working with my wife Anita to create these handbound volumes. This is really exciting … the last time Erzebet and Anita colluded, the result was the “Honey Corset,” created from the pages of Amal El-Mohtar’s The Honey Month for the author to wear.

The Honey Corset, side view

In that instance, a book got repurposed for wearing. In this instance … the books will wear you.

Here’s what Anita has in mind: she needs 18 people to send her fabric that matches their skin tone as exactly as possible. If you have a distinguishing birthmark, tattoo or other visual feature that marks your skin as distinctly yours, she’d like photos. She’ll recreate said mark on the fabric and use it to create the buttoned-together “Quiltmaker” book covers for Papaveria.

If you’re twisted enough to want in on this (and surely you must be if you’ve read this far) contact Anita at anita[dot]d[dot]allen[at]gmail[dot]com (replace bracketed words with corresponding characters) to get the finer details.