DESCENT INTO LIGHT

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).

My new poem “Carrington’s Ferry” has just appeared in Strange Horizons, a piece inspired by the life and works of Leonora Carrington. It’s the first installment in my “Disturbing Muses” cycle of poems since “Mondrian’s War” in 2008 (which, interestingly enough, also appeared in Strange Horizons.)

My poem “Budding” is now available in Issue 2 of Phantasmagorium, edited by new master of horror Laird Barron. I understand there will be a print edition to come, but as of now the new issue of the zine is available in PDF, .epub and .mobi format. Click here to learn more.

I’m still pretty giddy from the news that I’ve sold my first short story collection, but I had another sale earlier this week. New Star*Line editor F.J. Bergmann has accepted my poem “The Duelists” for her fall issue. Woo-hoo!

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:

I already did a long blog post in which I talked about the contents of Fantastique Unfettered 4 in some depth, so I’ll stick to the most important information (from my perspective):

First, it’s out! You can find it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and soon at other places.

Second, there’s much reason for me to crow: the issue contains my sf novelette “Stolen Souls,” a joint interview conducted by Alexandra Seidel with me and Hal Duncan, and three poems by me, “Binary,” “Sisyphus Crawls” and “Seed the Earth, Burn the Sky.” The cover art by Luis Beltrán is based on my poem “Binary.”

Received word this morning from Laird Barron that he’s buying my poem “Budding” for the next issue of Phantasmagorium. Woo-hoo! (“Budding” was inspired by a conversation with Nicole Kornher-Stace about child-rearing, something I have no first-hand experience with.)

I’ve posted two new featured poems on the Mythic Delirium website. The first comes from New York Times bestseller (and to think, I knew her when, hee) Catherynne M. Valente, along with audio of her reading this challenging new piece. The poem appears in our new issue, #25 (click here to buy or subscribe.)

Over on her blog, Cat says these things about it:

The Melancholy of Mecha Girl is a philosophical confessional poem about anime and giant robots.

And:

I am as proud of it as a short story.

The second poem, “The true poem” by my fellow Virginian, Serena Fusek, appeared in our previous issue, as did the accompanying illustrations by Paula Friedlander. The beautiful audio reading by Clarkesworld podcast director (and SFWA Interim Executive Director) Kate Baker is exclusive to our site, of course.

I hope you’ll check out both of these morsels. (Click here to do so.)

I note: I’ve been aware for a long time our website is pretty seriously outmoded, but we’ve gotten by. However, now that we’re going to start offering e-books (the new edition of Clockwork Phoenix being the first) it’s time for an upgrade. So these featured poems will be lasted presented in this format.

Though they won’t disappear — they’ll just be the first ones up at the new version of the site, so stay tuned.

I spent a fair chunk of last week (when I wasn’t fine tuning the new Kindle edition of Clockwork Phoenix or stuffing envelopes with the new issue of Mythic Delirium) proofing my portion of the new issue of the gorgeous print zine Fantastique Unfettered, due out in the very, very, very near future.

These folks have actually made me a featured author. See for yourself:

The entire table of contents, which you can view here, is pretty scrumptious: Fiction by Hal Duncan, Lynne Jamneck, Brenda Stokes Barron, Alma Alexander, Georgina Bruce, Hal Duncan, Carmen Lau and D. Harlan Wilson. Poetry by Shweta Narayan, Dan Campbell, J. C. Runolfson, Kaolin Fire, Jacqueline West and Kristine Ong Muslim. Interviews with Hal Duncan & Brent Weeks … and Hal Duncan & me!

In our interview, Alexa Seidel asked Hal & me to discuss the idea that “life is suffering.” Hal is about 100 times more eloquent than I am, but we basically agreed right off that [Spoiler Alert, heh!] suffering happens in life, but life is not equal to suffering, and then meandered in all sorts of fun directions from there.

For my part, being “Featured” means that I have three poems in the issue, “Sisyphus Walks,” “Seed the Earth, Burn the Sky” and “Binary,” all of them part of what I call the “Claire-dare” series, created when Claire “C.S.E.” Cooney bombarded me with poetry prompts last year.

The issue’s cover image is inspired by “Binary.” I’m still agog over that.

FU (love that acronym!) is also reprinting a science fiction novelette of mine first published in 1999 (it was technically my first “pro sale.”) It’s called “Stolen Souls,” and it’s a bizarre futuristic police procedural/revenge story about a guy named Venner whose lover Alys’ detachable brain (everyone has one in this society) is stolen to be divided up and used as part of a vast computer processor on a distant asteroid mine, and the extreme lengths Venner goes to a) kill everyone involved in her abduction and b) retrieve Alys and make her whole. The ending … is not exactly Happily Ever After. (Imagine that.)

“Stolen Souls” was published in a fun but obscure Australian zine named Altair; there was an attempt made to launch Altair in the U.S. but it died on the runway. So hardly anyone saw “Stolen Souls” when it came out, aside from one enthusiastic Tangent Online reviewer, heh. Proofreading this tale meant that I re-read it for the first time in many years. Sometimes re-reading one’s old work turns into a traumatic experience, but this time around it went in the opposite direction. My stories are almost never simple or straightforward, and “Stolen Souls” features the same kind of narrative flip-flops you find in my newer stuff, except more. Fact is, 2011 me wound up being a little awed by some of the pyrotechnics 1998-1999 me managed to engineer.

I kind of want to reach back in time to that version of me with a message akin to this: “Hey, man, brace yourself. You’ve put a lot of work into this story, and you’ll be paid a nice flat fee for it. And no one’s going to read it, and you’re going to wonder what you did wrong. (And it won’t be the last time that happens.) But thirteen years later you’re going to read this again as you’re prepping it for a really classy second debut, and you’re still going to be really happy with it.”

There’s a nostalgia factor here too, I’ll admit. The novelette’s opening section was the final thing I wrote while I was in the Creative Writing program at Hollins University (M.A. ’94.) You can tell, I think, that even-younger me wrote it; it’s a tad flowery and adjective-y, while the later sections are leaner and (much) meaner.

Anyway, between this and re-proofing the first Clockwork Phoenix, last week has been Memory Lane central. At least they’re all good memories!

John Neville, who played Romeo to Claire Bloom’s Juliet, Hamlet to Judi Dench’s Ophelia and Othello to Richard Burton’s Iago (and vice versa), but who may be best known in the United States as the title character in the exuberantly loopy film “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” and a recurring one in the television series “The X-Files,” died in Toronto on Saturday. He was 86.

From The New York Times obituary

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen may not be the best film ever made, but it’s hands-down my favorite movie. That was true even in the 1990s, when John Neville began appearing on The X-Files. I remember my first delighted exclamation on spotting him in the tailored suit of a Man in Black: “That’s Baron Munchausen!”

I wrote the following poem as a way of reconciling Neville’s best-known roles in my own head. It appeared in the late, lamented Talebones and in my collections Defacing the Moon and The Journey to Kailash. Now I offer it in tribute to a great, and under-celebrated, entertainer, along with the collage I created to illustrate it.

Munchausen vs. the Aliens

Urban legends encounter urbane liar,
tractor-beam him
right off his five-winged pegasus;
five oval grey heads
roll at saber-flicks,
before they clamp the Baron down,
pierce him in place,
spread him open.
His cavities issue
oily polygonal beasts
too wily to be
imprisoned in specimen jars.

His vivisection completed,
he thanks greys with grace,
folds them with their saucer
into imaginary space,
sealed forever inside
a tale he spins
beside the hearth-light.