DESCENT INTO LIGHT: Mike Allen’s Home Page

I’m pleased to announce that the following poems by the following poets have been accepted for Issue 25 of Mythic Delirium, which I hope to have out in early October.

• “An Unkindness of Ravens” • Rachel Manija Brown
• “Claiming Tyche; Nemesis Rising” • Michael Fosburg
• “Venus Crossing the Sun” • Melissa Frederick
• “Little Girls, Atom Bombs” • Jeannine Hall Gailey
• “Trans-Neptunian Shores” • Wade German
• “Babel Before Babel” • Howard V. Hendrix
• “The tenured faculty meets to discuss the Moon’s campus visit” • Rose Lemberg
• “Elegy for Robert Sheckley” • Florence Major
• “Joseph Carey Merrick” • Florence Major
• “Raven Singing” • Mari Ness
• “Silence” • Mari Ness
• “The Magic Walnut” • Sofía Rhei • Translation by Lawrence Schimel
• “Space Dogs” • Ann K. Schwader
• “Alien Graffiti” • Darrell Schweitzer
• “Cloth Demon” • Alexandra Seidel
• “Yurei” • Susan Slaviero
• “The Description of a Wish” • Sonya Taaffe
• “Moon Girl, Earth Guy” • Mary A. Turzillo
• “The Melancholy of Mechagirl” • Catherynne M. Valente
• “Nobody’s Song” • Jessica Paige Wick

Congratulations, all!

Further updating: Issue 24 is now collated and will go to the printer for binding on Monday.

And, again, if you sent me something for Issue 25 and you haven’t heard back from me yet, you need to query me. Like really, really, really soon…

Tags: contents, Mythic Delirium 25
Posted in Editing, Mythic Delirium

If you sent me any poems to be considered for Issue 25 of Mythic Delirium and you haven’t received a response, you need to query. To my knowledge, at this moment, I have given everyone an answer.

My hope is to see Issue 25 on its way to people’s mailboxes in early October.

Now, to get Issue 24 finished….

Posted in Mythic Delirium

Last week Tor Books released Nebula Awards Showcase 2011, edited by Kevin J. Anderson. Its publication marks a nice milestone for me as an editor that I feel the need to make a little note of.

The book reprints Saladin Ahmed’s “Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela,” a 2009 Nebula finalist for Best Short Story that I first published in Clockwork Phoenix 2: More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness, and Amal El-Mohtar’s “Song for an Ancient City,” the 2009 Rhysling Award winner for short poem, which I published in Mythic Delirium 19. In other words, an editorial double whammy.

Mind you, Saladin and Amal are both intimidatingly good writers, and I think these pieces would have done well wherever they wound up. But I’m proud that I got to showcase them first.

Posted in Editing, Signal boosts

My poem “Splendours to Devour” has just appeared in the June issue of Ideomancer. It’s a rather quirky end-of-the-world poem, inspired in part by a conversation with my pal Nicole Kornher-Stace. If you like it, I hope you’ll leave a comment there.

Posted in Poetry, Signal boosts

Last week I mentioned a poetry sale to a market so new it didn’t yet have an URL. Well, inkscrawl now has a URL, http://www.inkscrawl.net/, where submission guidelines can be found. Go check them out.

Posted in Poetry, Signal boosts

My brain is scrambled by the opposing forces of a virus invasion and the drugs that fight them, but I’m just coherent enough to make mention that I’ve sold another of the “Claire-dare” poems, “Heart’s Delight,” to Not One of Us. This poem in particular was prompted by Nicole Kornher-Stace, who offered me this delightful image to work with:

Posted in Poetry, Signal boosts, Writing

Presenting, at last, the cover art for Mythic Delirium 24:

So, obviously, the issue itself won’t be reaching folks until June. We apologize sincerely for the delay.

I can however offer some proof that the issue is worth the wait. Alexa Seidel has written a review that’s now up at the Fantastique Unfettered website:

“[A] venture into lightheartedness” is what editor Mike Allen calls this latest issue of Mythic Delirium. The poetry assembled here certainly makes for an excellent adventure, and lightheartedness often plays a part, but even so, all these lyrical quests have a weighty center.

Congrats to contributors Elissa Malcohn, Ian Watson, Marcie Lynn Tentchoff, Lucien E.G. Spelman, Serena Fusek and Shira Lipkin, whose poems receive special mention.

Posted in Mythic Delirium, Reviews

Just a quick note that next edition of “Poetry Planet” at StarShipSofa will, as I understand, contain two poems by me, that you could call Golden Oldies: “On Discovery of a Habitable World” (which is, actually, the first sf poem I ever wrote, though it evolved a bit after that first draft over 20 years ago) and “The Thing in the Gutter.” Both poems are “first contact” poems — or rather, my odd takes on the concept.

Posted in Poetry, Signal boosts

I’m pleased to announce that a short, eerie poem I co-wrote with Anita (her idea, my words) called “Unland, Unlife” has just sold to the electronic poetry zine inkscrawl, edited by Mitchell Hart, which is so new it doesn’t yet have a URL. More information coming (such as said URL) when I have it.

Posted in Poetry, Writing

T.J. McIntyre’s Southern Fried Weirdness: Reconstruction — all proceeds from which go to the Red Cross to help with tornado relief in the South — is out now on Smashwords and Amazon Kindle, with stories and poems from a cutting edge and up-and-coming roster including Nicole Kornher-Stace, Rae Bryant, Mari Ness, Berrien C. Henderson, Jaime Lee Moyer, Marshall Payne, Gustavo Bondini, Marsheila Rockwell, F. Brett Cox, Fabio Fernandes, Danny Adams and many others. (Click here to see the complete table of contents.)

The anthology also contains a folk tale-tinted horror story of mine that absolutely fits the “Southern Fried Weirdness” motif: “The Music of Bremen Farm.” Here’s a sample of the opening.

But for a flat tire, no one would have ever known that Old Hag Bremen was dead.

Her forebears, like other settlers from Germany, staked out plots in the shadows of the Blue Ridge Mountains even before the white colonies declared themselves a nation. Throughout the rolling hills, where houses regard each other across wide vales, and narrow roads still ford streams with wooden bridges held together by iron spikes, the Anglicized names speak from rusting mailboxes: Anselm. Flohr. Krone. Newman. Schrader.

Yet even in this place of isolation, with corn blanketing the hills for miles before giving way to ancient mountain slopes and defiant oak, the Bremens stayed a world apart. They sent no sons to fight in the War of Northern Aggression. They did not come to the whitewashed A-frame churches. They did not grow crops, or ask for work in others’ cattle farms or dairies or tobacco fields. Those few who knew the business of the Bremen family left them to it, and spoke of it at most in late night whispers that by morning seemed like troubled and half-forgotten dreams.

By the time the single-lane dirt ruts finally gave way to asphalt, only one Bremen remained, a sad, solitary heir rattling alone inside a rambling home more than three hundred years old: still with an outhouse, still with a kitchen standing separate from the building where she made her bed. Only the squirrels and wasps that took shelter in the walls kept her company.

In all its formats the anthology is only $2.99. I hope you’ll check it out.

Posted in Fiction, Short stories, Signal boosts