Robots, Imagination and the End of the World with Jeanine Hall Gailey

This week I had a chance to interview poet Jeannine Hall Gailey, whose work I first became familiar with as a regular presence in the Science Fiction Poetry Association. She's the author of five books of poetry, including the recently released Field Guide to the End of the World which came out this month. I've come to appreciate her imagination and sense of history as I read her work over the years.

She has a B.S. in Biology and an M.A. in English from the University of Cincinnati, as well as an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Pacific University. As one reads her poetry, it's easy to see she has a great respect for the mythic and fantastic, the classical and the contemporary. These range from Ovid's Metamorphoses or The Tales of Genji, to comic books and folktales.

With that range of influences, I always find it interesting to see what she does with her books, which include Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, and The Robot Scientist's Daughter.

Among her awards, she she received a 2007 Washington State Artist Trust GAP Grant and she is a two-time winner of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize (2007 and 2011.) She Returns to the Floating World was a Eric Hoffer Montainge Medal Finalist (2012) and received the  FPA President's Award for Poetry (2011). Two of her poems from Becoming the Villainess, "Persephone and the Prince Meet Over Drinks" and "Becoming the Villainess," appeared in the 2007 edition of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. She also took an "Honorable Mention" in the 2008 Mainichi Haiku Contest. She also served as the 2nd poet laureate of Redmond, Washington.

In addition to her poetry, she also writes book reviews, flash fiction, and occasionally creative non-fiction. She recently taught with National University's MFA program and the Young Artist Project at Centrum.

I was delighted she shared so much of her journey with me during our conversation, and I think there's much we can learn from her approach to speculative poetry and her literary journey.

Let's start from the beginning. When did you develop an interest in poetry?
I've been writing poems on a regular basis since about fifth grade, when a teacher encouraged me to try to write every morning before school and pointed me to Emily Dickinson and Carl Sandburg for inspiration. My mother also shared her college poetry textbooks (she was in college when I was in grade school) and that was very inspiring to me as well. Even before I tried to really publish much, I was writing regularly. I started sending work out regularly around 2002.

How would you describe your access to poetry growing up?

(Did I already answer that question above?) If not, besides the fifth grade teacher and my mother's college textbook (Introduction to Poetry by X.J. Kennedy used, circa 1969, if you're curious), I also participated in poetry recitation contests (my school was super nerdy that way!) and won a couple of years in a row with poems from e.e. cummings and Louis Simpson (his excellent "My Father in the Night Commanding No" is a terrific high-school kid poem), which encouraged me to continue to memorize and recite poetry. I used to carry a very tattered copy of Edna St. Vincent Millay to school with me in high school to read between classes. I also loved Edgar Allen Poe and T.S. Eliot, especially "The Raven" and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

Have you always been in Washington? What was your family's reaction to your poetic path?

No, I've lived all over. I was born at Yale Hospital in New Haven, Connecticut, where my father worked in research for early CT-scan machines, then we moved to LA, then Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where he worked at University of Tennessee and consulted at Oak Ridge National Labs. I wrote The Robot Scientist's Daughter (Mayapple Press, 2015) all about growing up in an "atomic city." Later we moved to Cincinnati where he taught at University of Cincinnati, which is where I went to get my undergrad in Biology and MA in English. I took a job in Richmond, Virginia, stayed there for a year, and then got an offer from Microsoft in Seattle, which I quickly accepted. I really did love working there, but got sick a little bit into my time there, and my husband encouraged me then to go get a low-residency MFA. I think that's when I really got serious about publishing as well as writing, and the Pacific Northwest is a wonderful place to be a writer - wonderful inspiring natural surroundings, a supportive writing community, and a great art-and-coffee-shop culture. (I had a quick flirtation with CA as an adult too - a year in Napa, and a year in San Diego.) So really, I've lived everywhere I've ever wanted to live except probably Boston and Paris.

My parents had encouraged me to study medicine - I was pre-med for my first degree. I finished the degree in three years, but ended up with some severe health problems, so medical school was off the plans for me as I recuperated. I ended up working as a tech writer - my mother was a technical writer for years - and going back for my MA in English while I worked full-time. I don't think this is probably the typical poet's journey - planning for one career, doing a second, and meanwhile writing the whole time - but that's how it worked out for me.

Which poem of yours do you usually recommend to someone who wants to read your work for the first time?

That's a tough one. I've been kind of in love with two poems from the new book, Field Guide to the End of the World, "Introduction to Disaster Preparedness" and "Epilogue." But if you really want a quintessential "me" kind of poem, then go with "Wonder Woman Dreams of the Amazon" from my first book, Becoming the Villainess.

Do you prefer coffee or tea?

I love tea, but became, if you can believe it, allergic to it in the last six years, and I don't drink a ton of coffee but I do love the smell and taste of it. I use coffee in cooking all the time! My husband the real coffee lover - he could probably tell you the best local places in Seattle to buy roasted coffee, to try a latte, or experience a particularly interesting brewing process. I love the coffee shops here for the community and the atmosphere - we are very luck to have a ton of great coffee shops nearby. I think bottling the smell of coffee and selling it a a perfume would be an excellent idea. I know I would wear it!

If you could have any imaginary being for a pet or companion, what would it be?

Oh, I think I have to go with flying telepathic time-traveling unicorn as shown in A Swiftly Tilting Planet, but if that wasn't available, definitely one of the Anne McCaffrey psychic-type dragons or even just one of her fire lizards.

You've had some exciting successes lately, including two second-place finishes for Book of the Year for Unexplained Fevers(2014), and The Robot Scientist's Daughter (2016) from the Science Fiction Poetry Association, as well as the release of your latest book, Field Guide to the End of the World, which received the Moon City Press Book Prize. Each goes into some very different territories of speculative literature. Can you tell us a little about your process for determining a focus for your manuscripts?

Thank you for saying that! I think we poets rarely think of ourselves as successes.

Each book sort of decides itself – this latest book started off with these odd postcards by a fictional person at the end of the world, along with the idea of syllabus-themed poems “Introduction to Ecotoxicology,” for instance. The academic-theme was sort of apocalyptic, and the post-apocalyptic postcard series sort of made a good counterpoint to the science poems, and that’s how that happened.

The Robot Scientist’s Daughter happened when I tried to write some truly autobiographical poems – a challenge I hadn’t really bothered with much before this book – and even though it did end up with a series of persona poems, it was a much more historically-based book than any of my others. (I still have a ton of books having to do with the cold war, the atomic age, Oak Ridge’s history, etc. Fascinating stuff!)

So I think each book sort of defines itself as I go – I don’t really start out with the idea of the book, I usually have an idea for some poems, and that idea develops as I write more and more poems. I do end up with very thematic books, but that’s probably because of the way I write – a series of poems on a certain theme or subject until I run out of energy.

When are you most often satisfied with a poem? What's the signal to yourself that the poem is finished, at least for the moment?

Sometimes a poem isn’t really finished until it’s in the final copyedit of a book manuscript, and I might still change a poem after that. Some poems are very malleable, and some come out completely finished. I don’t ever really feel completely satisfied with my poems – there’s usually something I’ll feel like changing after reading it years later. Is that terrible? Or just the nature of language – that we’re never completely hitting all the notes we want to hit?

Washington seems to inspire many poets and the writers of the fantastic and the imaginative. What catches your interest about the Washington speculative arts scene?

I’ve always thought Seattle was the inspiration for Frank Baum’s Emerald City, and didn’t Ray Bradbury live in Oregon for a while? And I got to see Ursula Le Guin read poetry and defend the reputation of speculative writing during a storm on the Oregon coast, which was grand. Of course lots of science fiction and fantasy writers are drawn to a place with fewer crowds, more grand mountains/volcanoes, oceans, crater lakes, medieval-type forests, odd buildings and weird-looking mushrooms. I really like the variety of writers out here, and I do feel there’s a bit more tolerance for the eccentric – be it in writing, art, or clothing/hair color – than other places. I’ve never really “fit in” anywhere I’ve lived, but it feels like a good place to not fit in, if you know what I mean. There’s a museum here run by Paul Allen – formerly known as the EMP, known now as the Museum of Pop Culture, which includes exhibits on rock music and science fiction – first editions of classic sci-fi novels, cover art, and great exhibits on Star Wars, Star Trek, and Game of Thrones. It’s a great place to wonder around if you’re a sci-fi/fantasy fan feeling touristy in downtown Seattle.

Everyone's dying to know: What does it feel like being a poet laureate of a city like Redmond?

I served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond – they’re on their fourth now – but I had a lot of fun, especially working with the techie-poetry connection and working with the extremely talented young people at the high school and at the Redmond Library. Redmond is noted as a tech-friendly town – home to Microsoft, where I worked briefly, to the American headquarters for Nintendo and video game schools like Digipen. So it’s an educated and diverse populace, but not maybe as known for its artistic culture as, say, downtown Seattle. I felt the audience there was engaged in science and tech but felt alienated from literature, so I focused on the connections between those things. We talked about superheroes and anime characters and e-books, and things like Japanese poetic forms and poetry translations.

I feel lucky that I lived in a city that valued the arts to have a Poet Laureate program! I’ve recently moved to another town on the East side of Seattle called Woodinville – I’m hoping I can persuade them to start one as well! Seattle doesn’t have an official Poet Laureate program, but Washington State does, and I’ve been lucky enough to be friends with a couple of poets who served in that program. They travelled all over the state to promote poetry in different towns and environments, from the Pasco desert to Yakima wine country – truly, it sounded much more grueling that my gig. I encourage poets and people who care about poetry to show up with a plan to their own city councils and ask about setting aside a small budget and a small amount of time in their Parks and Rec programs for a Poet Laureate program! Poets can do a LOT with a small budget – for instance, I was able pay visual artists and show collaborations between artists and poets, as well as have in guest speakers to run workshops for teens. Why not? It benefits the population, the city and the reputation for culture in both small and large towns.

What are the ideal writing conditions and workspaces for you?

I can pretty much write anywhere I bring a laptop, and I've written a lot of poems of scraps of paper and receipts, backs of prescriptions, in offices, used car lots, in line at the supermarket...one of the places I write the most is where I spend a lot of time, unfortunately - hospitals and doctor's waiting rooms. Lots of spare time with nothing better to do and lots of stress = effective poetry writing. My new place (we just moved) actually has an office just for me, which is I think the first time I've had dedicated space in a long time. It's really nice!

What's been the hardest secret of writing for you to get across to your students?

That reading widely and deeply - in other subjects, other genres, etc - isn't something dangerous that will screw up their voice, but something necessary that will help them become better writers. No one should be afraid to read because it will "steal their voice" or "influence them too much." If you read enough, all the influences sort of blend together to help make your writing voice even more individual, nuanced, unique.

What has been one of your favorite readings?

I really liked seeing Margaret Atwood read. I think I remember she not only read, but she sang in her funny Canadian/midwestern twang. She also held really tight to her purse the entire time she was giving her lecture and reading. I also love hearing Dorianne Laux read, every time I see her.

What would you name your robot?

I'd probably name her after a character in Greek mythology. There's something so inherently tragic about being a robot, isn't there? Calypso or Cassandra or Calliope. All the robot characters I write are quite melancholy.

You can visit Jeanine Hall Gailey online at: http://webbish6.com/

Black Stars, Dead Badgers, Chimeric Machines and Lucy A. Snyder

This week I'm interviewing Lucy A. Snyder, an Ohio-based award-winning writer whose impressive body of work embraces science fiction, fantasy, humor, horror, poetry and nonfiction.

She's received four Bram Stoker Awards, and her body of work currently includes over 150 short stories, 60 poems, and 4 novels. Her writing has appeared in Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, Hellbound Hearts, Doctor Who Short Trips: Destination Prague, Chiaroscuro, GUD, and Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. You can visit her online at www.lucysnyder.com

At the moment, I'm taking a particular interest in her 2015 collection While The Black Stars Burn from Raw Dog Screaming Press. Her latest contains 13 dark stories, several of which are Lovecraftian or tie in with the King in Yellow mythos. That naturally attracts my attention, as does the Ohio connection. Her poetry collection Chimeric Machines is one I would highly recommend for some intriguing ideas and approaches to speculative poetry.

I was delighted to have her share some of her perspective with me, and I look forward to seeing what comes next for her.

Do you mind telling us when you first developed an interest in writing? How would you describe your access to science fiction and fantasy growing up?

I grew up in a house full of books. My parents read to me every night when I was little -- mostly fairy tales and children's fantasy like the Oz books and Alice in Wonderland -- and taught me to treat books as something special. This more than anything inspired me to become a writer. It was Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time that simultaneously hooked me as a lifelong science fiction/fantasy reader and fixed me on the idea of writing fantasy and SF instead of mainstream work. I remember that the book spoke to me in a way that nothing I'd read until then really had, and I had that shivery sense of wonder you get with really good speculative fiction. And I thought to myself that if I could write something that made another person feel the way I was feeling, then that would have to be the best job in the world.

We often hear about how writers get started, but what keeps you going these days, as a writer?

I love books ... and I especially love getting books in the mail that have my name on them! That's the simple answer: author copies. The more complicated answer is that writing is the one thing I've really dedicated myself to professionally. Consequently, I've set all sorts of short- and long-term goals for myself, and seeing myself gradually achieving those goals keeps me pressing on to the next goal. The occasional bit of fan email doesn't hurt, either!

Which story of yours do you usually recommend to someone who wants to read your work for the first time?

It would have to be either "Magdala Amygdala", which won the Bram Stoker Award and which has been my most frequently-anthologized story, or "Installing Linux on a Dead Badger", which became a minor Internet meme. And which story I recommended would depend on the tastes of the reader, I expect. Most horror readers agree that "Magdala Amygdala" is my best piece of short fiction so far, but "Installing Linux on a Dead Badger" is funny (in all senses of the word) and readers have told me that the humor in it really connected with them.

Do you prefer coffee or tea?

I drink both. I'll drink several cups of green tea during the course of a day, but I absolutely have to start the day with a glass of iced coffee with milk. I'll be happy to drink hot coffee, but I like cold coffee just as much.

What inspired While the Black Stars Burn? What was your writing process like for this one?

It's a collection, and so in a general sense, my writing process wasn't any different than it was for Soft Apocalypses or any of my other collections. And the process in general is write stories, generally for anthologies or magazines; I try to sell most of my individual stories at least once before I put them in a collection, simply because I earn more money from my writing that way, but I also do try to include one or two new pieces in a book. Once I have a critical mass of stories I haven't collected, I go through them to see if and how they fit together. I spend a fair bit of time looking at how the stories flow and resonate with each other when I'm putting a collection together. I've gotten better at that as I've gotten more experience.

I've been productive enough that I've been able to release two story collections two years running, and both of them have contained fairly recent stories. I wrote most of the stories in While the Black Stars Burn in the past couple of years. I've been getting a lot of invitations to write for Lovecraftian and King in Yellow themed anthologies, and the contents of the book strongly reflect that. I've also been reading Robert Chambers (the author of The King in Yellow) and Lovecraft for my MFA work and have been thinking about those two authors quite a lot, and so I've been intentionally working with various themes from their fiction.

For instance, I wrote the title story, "While the Black Stars Burn," after I was invited to submit a story for the Cassilda's Song anthology. I knew I wanted to write a story evocative of the Chambers story "In the Court of the Dragon" and also evocative of Lovecraft's story "The Music of Erich Zann" but which was not a copycat pastiche of either one. I ended up writing the story at my first winter residency at Goddard College, and the heat wasn't working well in my dorm room, and my being profoundly cold definitely influenced the story as well. In addition to being physically uncomfortable, I was wildly underslept and fighting a bit of writer's block. I remember I ended up watching the "Turn Down For What" video on YouTube about 20 times in a row before I wrote the bulk of the story. Why did I watch the DJ Snake video so obsessively, and how did it affect the story? No clue. My brain is a strange place.

You also write humor, such as "Installing Linux On A Dead Badger." Have you found you process very different between these genres?

I do try to include humor in my fiction as leavening against the horror, but yes, my process for writing specifically humor stories is rather different. Instead of imagining a character with a problem, I usually start with a ridiculous concept, treat it seriously, but then spin it out to even more ridiculous extremes. For instance, how would you install linux on a dead badger, and why? And what kind of world would you have in which that was a desirable installation? Characters in that case become supporting players to the situation and concept, and my focus is on layering in different kinds of humor.

Your experiences include time in South Carolina, Texas, and now Ohio. What's been the great commonality between these spaces, and what are some of the biggest differences you've found?

At this stage, people move around so much that I think the regions have much more in common than they used to (if indeed those huge differences ever really existed). People are people, for good and for ill. I'm good friends with people who grew up in environments I was led to believe were so different than my own that we could never possibly have anything in common. But we do: movies, books, music ... all the cultural elements that transcend regions and countries. Last summer, I was a guest at AnimeKon, a pop culture convention in Barbados, and the people there were geeking out over all the same movies and shows and comics that they geek about at conventions here in Ohio.

Despite chain restaurants taking over the American landscape, I'd say the food is the biggest difference between South Carolina, Texas, and Ohio. I didn't know what most good Italian or Polish food was like until I moved North. And despite the blossoming of Mexican cuisine in Columbus, I have yet to find a place here that serves a decent tamale. Of course, my definition of a decent tamale is based on what I ate in San Angelo when I was growing up, and I'm sure that anyone from Mexico City would look at the tamales in the restaurants there and say "What? This is not a real tamale ...."

You took on some fascinating subjects in your poetry collection Chimeric Machines. How long did it take to complete this collection, and which poem do you feel you worked the most on?

I wrote the poems in that collection over the course of about 10 years. The one I worked on the most intensively was probably "Flyboy"; it's a narrative sestina, which is a challenging form.

Do you feel there's been a significant difference between your mindset for poetry and your mindset for short stories?

Yes, very much so, although there can be a lot of overlap in writing poetry and in writing micro-fiction in terms of needing to be mindful of the weight and effect of every word. Writing poetry opens up parts of my mind that writing fiction does not. You have to focus on layering in meaning, on how your line breaks affect those meanings, and on how the words look and sound together within the poem. The story in a narrative poem is often the least interesting thing about it, though of course that surface story is what a lot of causal poetry readers are primarily experiencing when they read a poem. It's a challenge to write a compact, vivid poem that explodes with layered meanings, but I find it very satisfying.

Cajun Sushi Hamsters, Murder, Aliens and Cats. An interview with Mary Turzillo

Mary Turzillo is a writer of many talents with a great sense of humor, imagination and poetry that I admire. I first ran into her work as a member of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, and quickly realized we had many things in common as writers with roots in the Midwest.

Based in Ohio, her work includes the award-winning Lovers & Killers, which won the the very first Elgin Award for Book of the Year from the Science Fiction Poetry Association. She also received a Nebula Award for her novelette Mars is No Place for Children. Her short fiction has been appearing since at least 1994, and she's produced three poetry collections so far beginning with her 2007 debut Your Cat & Other Space Aliens.

Mary has been a professor at Kent State University, and written books on Anne McCaffrey and Philip Jose Farmer. Her husband is the science fiction writer and scientist Geoffrey Landis, who I also feel does wonderful and thoughtful work well worth reading. In Cleveland, she founded the Cajun Sushi Hamsters writing workshop.

I was very curious to see her perspective as a writer and poet, and I appreciate her taking the time out to discuss this ideas with me. Be sure to visit her website and check out her writing.There's much to learn from her style and technique, and I'm looking forward to seeing her next collections.

How did you first develop an interest in poetry? How would you describe your access to poetry growing up?

I was read to from a very early age (two or three) by my grandmother, grandfather, and mother. According to my grandmother, I swatted my grandfather because he didn't use enough emotion in his reading. A lot of books for very young children are in verse, as you realize.

Once I got into first grade, I conceptualized that words on paper were connected to spoken words and stories, and I resolved to write my own Things (I didn't see any difference between poems and stories, and I still don't, really). My mother happens to have saved my first poem, which I wrote down in second grade.

She bought me complete works of Edgar Allan Poe, which of course set the course of my imagination for the ensuing years.


Which poem of yours do you usually recommend to someone who wants to read your work for the first time?

Oh, how to choose? Let me recommend three, since poems are short. "The Emperor's New Spacesuit," "If You Loved Me" (my elegy to borderline personality disorder), and "The Hunter's Mothers." These are in Your Cat & Other Space Aliens, (VanZeno).

The book I'm proudest of is Lovers & Killers, from Dark Regions Press which won the Elgin award in 2013.

I also have a recently published Best of chapbook called A Guide to Endangered Monsters, from Night Ballet Press. It has all my favorites and prizewinners.

Do you prefer coffee or tea?

I like both, but lean a bit more to tea. My preferences change all the time, but right now I like Tulsi Red Chai Masala. And of course, like all cultured people, I love Earl Grey.

If you could have any legendary being for a pet or a companion, what would you choose?

Ganesha, because he is the the remover of obstacles, patron of arts and sciences, god of intellect and learning, Lord of beginnings, and the writer's best friend. And who wouldn't love a deity in the shape of an elephant? But maybe that's a bit blasphemous, because Ganesha is, after all, a god. So my second choice would be Gummitch, from Fritz Leiber's "Space-Time for Springers."

What aspects of life in Ohio did you find most conducive to writing? Did you feel there any distinctive challenges?

Cleveland is a real hub for writing of all kinds. My husband runs a blog called clevelandpoetics (http://www.clevelandpoetics.blogspot.com). The clevelandpoets calendar shows at least one poetry event every night, sometimes several. We have at least ten local indy presses, and I'm not even counting college and university presses. Northeast Ohio is the happening place for poetry. I spent time in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Pasadena, and it was hard to find much going on. Workshops, if there were any, were run by university prigs who wanted to charge huge fees, and who in my humble opinion needed a few lessons themselves, in humility if nothing else. As to readings in Pasadena and Boston? Oh, maybe a few here and there. A couple a month. Never open mic. But in contrast, Cleveland, Youngstown, and Akron have some wow stuff going on. Cleveland's slam team is prominent in the nation.

As far as fiction is concerned, in the internet age, geography is not a big issue. You read, you submit electronically, no problems.

Superman was born here. Roger Zelazny (who was a poet in addition to being a fiction writer). Vachel Lindsay. Hart Crane. Rita Dove. Paul Laurence Dunbar. Langston Hughes. James Wright. Ambrose Bierce. Gloria Steinem. Joe Eszterhas. Leigh Brackett. Harlan Ellison. Kenneth Patchen. John Scalzi lives here now. The list goes on.

Sometimes Geoff and I think the cornucopia of poetry opportunities is a lure that keeps us from writing fiction.

When did you feel Your Cat & Other Space Aliens was "finished" and ready to send to publishers for consideration?

Actually, it didn't happen that way. I do a lot of readings, mostly local in northeast Ohio, but also at cons, both in the US and the UK. A local poet and editor, Marcus Bales, had heard me read and had also read my stuff. He was inaugerating a press devoted to spoken word poetry, and he asked me to submit a group of poems. I gave him 96 poems, about half of which were already published, and he chose 69 of these to be in the book. In some ways, Marcus was a collaborator, in that he selected poems that he thought were the best and that worked together thematically. He didn't edit the poems themselves, but he definitely worked with me on concept. We came up with the title together and it really works for me.

I've never actually published a poetry collection that I submitted cold. I do have a couple of books I've lazily shopped around for various contests and publishers. I don't like fee contests; I am concerned that younger, less well-heeled authors are shut out of that process. Not everybody can shell out $50.00 every time they see a new call for a manuscript. I have five single-author collections in print, and all of them have been published because the editor came to me. I admit it, I'm lazy.

Anyway, Marcus published Your Cat & Other Space Aliens under his imprint of VanZeno, and I'm really happy with how it came out. He's a brilliant editor and incidentally a very fine satiric poet.

Marge Simon and I have four collaborative collections, and she placed them, being not only a genius poet but a woman who knows the indy poetry landscape better than anybody else in the known universe. She was a long-time president of the Small Press Writers and Artists Organization. We mull over where to submit (we have been rejected a few times, mostly because our concepts were pure hubris). And we mull over whether each book is finished. In fact, we're mulling that over right now with a book called Satan's Spawn.

I should mention that the brilliant and underappreciated poet Bruce Boston has edited two of my collections and also the collaborations Marge and I did. Bruce came up with the title of Lovers & KIllers, and he also did the cover. I couldn't be happier.

What's been one of the most unusual subjects you've tried to take on with a poem?

Jodi Arias. Marge and I are writing a collection of poems about murderesses. Jodi stands out as one of the strangest subjects for poetry that I can think of.

What's one of your enduring memories from the Cajun Sushi Hamsters?

Steve Swiniarski (A.K.A. S. Andrew Swann) brought the early manuscript of Forests of the Night to our workshop, and we gave him enthusiastic encouragement. We have a custom that a writer has to bring a bottle of champagne to the workshop when he or she sells a story. When Steve sold Forests, and was reminded of this, he confessed shamefacedly, "I'm not old enough to buy champagne."

How easy is it for you to determine if a piece should be prose or poetry? What was the most difficult example to choose from, so far?

Basically, the issue is whether I want to spend an afternoon first-drafting a poem, a couple of weeks making it into a story, or a year making it into a novel. If I can stab the subject quick and deadly, it's a poem. I have a poem I've never published about a certain genetic aberration, and I've written a novelette on the same theme. They go together. I've never sent the poem out, because it would be a spoiler for the novelette. I really should get that novelette in the mail --

Of course fiction needs more of everything. My poetry tends to be narrative, but a story or a novel needs a lot of threads and characters and incidents.

I say I can write a poem in an afternoon, but I've picked at poems, adding a word, removing a word, twisting a line, for years. You know how it is, right? You lie in bed trying to think of the exact right word.

Are there any frontiers in poetry that you feel today's poets could explore more?

Right now SFnal writers are dodging the whole form issue. We need to write form poetry, not just doggeral, but actual good villanelles, sonnets, tanka, sestinas, etc. I personally write a lot of non-form poetry, and I don't think it's in any way inferior to the hard stuff, but I think poets should experiment with form just to see how it feels. I think what a person learns from writing metered poetry or poetry that has some exterior shaping transfers to free verse.

I also think many speculative poets should browse in the vast ocean of poetry that's being published and performed today. There's so much. So much variety.

One good thing is that there seems to be no wall between speculative poetry and the poetry of the greater literary world. A lot of Billy Collins' work could appear in Asimov's. I sometimes meet poets who have no idea that their work is speculative and then a couple months later, at my suggestion, they submit to Star*Line and get an acceptance.

Howls and Fairies. A Conversation with Mary McMyne

Mary McMyne is a poet whose work I first came across through my membership with the Science Fiction Poetry Association. I've found her to be a delightful and exacting talent with a vivid sense of imagination and verse. She recently won the Science Fiction Poetry Association's 2015 Elgin Award for her chapbook Wolf Skin, from Dancing Girl Press. Like any excellent collection, Wolf Skin begins with a seemingly familiar premise, and the adventure is where it goes from there. It's a brief work, but it leaves you hungry for more.

Her roots begin in south Louisiana, in what she describes as "a plain white house at the edge of a deep dark wood." Her writing includes both short stories and poetry, with a focus on fiction. She studied literature and creative writing at Louisiana State University, and received an MFA from New York University. She has received several distinctions for her work including the Faulkner Prize for a Novel-in-Progress and the Sustainable Arts Foundation Promise Award. 

She lives in Sault Sainte Marie, in northern Michigan, and is presently an assistant professor and co-editor of Border Crossing at Lake Superior State University, she teaches courses in English and creative writing. Having grown up in southern Michigan, I was interested to see how she found inspiration there, particularly in the Upper Peninsula. She is also the poetry editor for Faerie Magazine.

Mary McMyne has been very prolific over the years, with interviews, reviews, fiction and poetry appearing in the Los Angeles Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Word Riot, Pedestal Magazine, New Delta Review, New Myths, Apex Magazine, American Book Review and the anthologies The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works and The Burden of Light: Poems on Illness and Loss,  just to name a few. You can visit her online at marymcmyne.com.


Do you mind telling us when you first developed an interest in poetry? How would you describe your access to poetry growing up?

I was filling spiral-bound notebooks with handwritten novels and poems from the time I was about eight or nine. I still remember an epic poem I tried to write about St. George and the Dragon at that age on a road trip: sitting in the back seat of our small car with my little brother and sister, asking my mother for help with rhyming words as the trees whizzed by outside. I was a musical kid, who played and wrote songs on the piano, and I was fascinated by the sounds and rhythms of words. I kept writing all the way through middle school and high school, taking creative writing classes and entering contests (in eleventh grade, I won a prize for a poem I wrote about a comet). I was very lucky to have encouraging parents. Our house was full of books. They both read voraciously, and my mother took us to the library weekly. She was a kindergarten teacher who read to us every night and wanted to write children's books. My father was a once-aspiring writer who worked as a technical salesman. (I didn't know this about him until not long before he died, but apparently, he burned everything he'd ever written in his 20s and never wrote again.) He subscribed to Fantasy & Science Fiction, Science, Nature, and National Geographic. They introduced me to Robert Frost, Edgar Allen Poe, Isaac Asimov, and Ray Bradbury. By the time I was nine or so, my bedroom shelves were stacked with books: classic poetry collections, dictionaries and encyclopedias and novel series. Gold-edged, leatherbound editions of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales (which are very lyrically written), Greek myths, the Brothers Grimm, and Alice in Wonderland ("Jabberwocky" was my favorite poem for years as a kid). There wasn't a particular focus on poetry, but they made sure I had access to literature in general.

We often hear about how writers get started, but what keeps you going these days, as a poet?

I'll be honest. I write poetry when I'm inspired to do so. When I'm working on a longer project, I agree with so many other writers who advise that you've got to sit down and do the work even when you don't feel like it. I'm working on a novel, right now, and for that project, because I'm in it for the long haul, I schedule out my time. I block it off on my calendar and show up to do the work. I force myself to sit down and invite the muse, to cultivate inspiration through contemplation. But I never start a project unless I am on fire to write it, and each poem is a project of its own for me, even if it's part of a longer manuscript. Nabokov was talking about prose when he described inspiration, but I can think of no better explanation as to what keeps me going as a poet. I overhear a phrase spoken aloud, see or read something that disturbs or elates me, and I know immediately from my emotional reaction--a heightened sense of awareness, a psychological sort of tingling--that I am going to write a poem about it. "A prefatory glow, not unlike some benign variety of the aura before an epileptic attack, is something the artist learns to perceive very early in life," Nabokov wrote. "This feeling of tickly well-being branches through [the artist] like the red and the blue in the picture of a skinned man under Circulation... It expands, glows, and subsides without revealing its secret." When I feel that way, I stop whatever I am doing and write. If I'm in the car, I turn on the sound recorder on my phone and dictate orally. And so a poem is born. Development and revision follow over the next few weeks or months. The poem calls me back, over and over, until it has revealed its secret.


Which poem of yours do you usually recommend to someone who wants to read your work for the first time?

If they like fairy tales, "Wolf Skin" (the title poem of my chapbook, which first appeared in Los Angeles Review). If they like science poetry, "Irene Joliot Curie" (a poem of mine which first appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly).


When you're writing speculative poetry what's been your general line of thinking when determining the balance between the realistic and the fantastic?

I tend to be more absorbed by projects that explore some element of the unreal—whether that be myth, fantasy or science fiction, folklore, the supernatural, or simply intense subjectivity—but I'm dissatisfied with work that doesn't engage enough with reality. There are two types of poems in my chapbook, Wolf Skin: realistic poems about a modern woman whose mother told her dark fairy tales as a child, and fantastic poems about the versions of those tales she re-imagines as an adult. The realistic poems bookend the fantastic ones: the beginning of the collection explores the woman’s adult life after her mother dies; the middle poems follow her into the unreal to reexamine her childhood mythos; and the final poems follow her back into the real world with her worldview and sense of self transformed. I played with a draft of the chapbook that included only fantastic poems, but was ultimately dissatisfied with it because it retold the tales without fully examining the role they play in our lives. An important function of speculative poetry, I think, is to use the unreal as a sort of mirror in which we can better see ourselves. Many of the fantastic poems in Wolf Skin imagine realistic motivations for fantastic villains or flat female characters, in order to interrogate the explanations we’ve accepted for those characters’ actions—too easily—all our lives.


What served as the impetus for Wolf Skin as a manuscript?

I moved to Sault Ste. Marie, a remote town in Upper Peninsula Michigan, when my daughter was nine months old to take a professorship at Lake Superior State University. When we drove over the Mackinac Bridge into the Upper Peninsula with all of our things, it felt like I was entering another world. I was enchanted by the way the trees loomed over I-75, how wild and remote and empty everything seemed. At night, I read fairy tales to my daughter, the way my mother had read them to me, and I started to wonder how they changed over time as they were written down, what ancient oral versions of the tales might now be lost to history. After I put my daughter to bed, I would research the way the tale I’d read to her that night had changed over time, and how the various versions intersected with history. This research would often inspire a poem, though it was also feeding the historical fairy tale novel I was (and still am) working on. For instance, the last two lines in my poem, “Old Woman Gothel,” were originally the opening for a section of an early novel draft. It’s difficult for me to talk about one project without the other because they’re interconnected; the poems in Wolf Skin and my novel-in-progress were born out of the same impulse.

How many poems did it take before you felt that you were on to a whole text?

I had written about eight or nine poems before it occurred to me I might have a chapbook on my hands. My friend and colleague, the poet Julie Brooks Barbour – who was wonderful about encouraging me to write poetry when I first moved to Sault Ste. Marie – kept telling me I was writing a chapbook, but I didn’t believe her until I began to see connections between the realistic and fantastic poems. After that, I started trying to imagine how each poem would fit into the structure of the whole as I wrote it, and the story that connects all of the poems began to take shape.

There are numerous well-known fairy tale characters who make their appearance in Wolf Skin. Who was the most difficult for you to approach through a poetic lens?

The bulk of the poems in Wolf Skin are persona poems, written from the perspectives of fairy tale characters who were glossed over or marginalized in the popular tales, so the key to getting each of them to work was usually knowing what each speaker wanted to say and why. Once I understood the answers to those questions for a given poem, it would come out fairly easily in its speaker’s voice, and polishing it was simply a question of editing. The characters I struggled with most were those whose motivations for speaking weren’t as clear to me, like the prince from Rapunzel and the woodcutter from Red Riding Hood. It was difficult for me to figure out why these characters would be moved to speak at all, because they are already represented as heroes in the traditional tales. This meant that these characters didn’t quite end up getting a voice the way other characters do. In "Wolf Skin,” for example, the speaker isn’t the woodcutter from Red Riding Hood at all, but another speaker addressing him with irony.


One of your earliest published poems was "Ghost Story," in the New Delta Review in 2010. What inspired this poem?

“Ghost Story” is a long persona poem, written in prose, from the perspective of a fictional girl who grew up in the Ninth Ward before Hurricane Katrina hit. Her story is that she moved to Baton Rouge with her mother as a teenager and lost her grandmother and childhood home in the storm. I was living in New York City in 2005 when Katrina hit, but I was visiting a childhood friend in New Orleans on the one-year-anniversary of the hurricane. My friend, who had only recently moved back to the city after staying with friends in Texas, took me to the Ninth Ward. It was heartbreaking and surreal to see what had become of the neighborhood. There were sofas hanging upside down in the bars of porches, cracked foundations of churches without roofs, the rusting remnants of overturned cars. I took photographs, because the landscape was so surreal and horrifying. Over the years, I kept thinking about it. One weekend, after I moved back to south Louisiana to take a teaching job, I heard the girl’s voice in my head and wrote the poem very quickly. The piece is called “Ghost Story” because the speaker visits the Ninth Ward after the storm and sees the ghost of herself as a child, her grandmother, the neighborhood, everything that is now gone, superimposed over the landscape.


Do you feel there's anything about life in Michigan that's conducive to a literary mindset, particularly in the Upper Peninsula?

Long, cold winters. Deep, dark woods. My wonderful job, teaching in an English department with other creative writers. My basement writing studio.


What's been an unexpectedly useful skill for you as a poet?

My graduate studies focused on the craft of writing literature, not the business of marketing it, but I was a professional business and technical writer for a few years before I began teaching writing. It was useful, once I had a chapbook to promote, to be able to draw from that experience.


How did you get involved with Faerie Magazine? Do you have any tips for emerging poets to avoid faerie clichés these days?

About ten years ago, I was introduced to its current editor-in-chief, Carolyn Turgeon, by my dear writer friend, Ronlyn Domingue, because Carolyn and I share a deep love of myths and fairy tales. We’ve corresponded and read one another’s work ever since. Not long after Carolyn took over as editor-in-chief at Faerie, she asked if I would be able to contribute a poem from what was then my poetry chapbook-in-progress. I sent her “Rapunzel Tucks the Twins into Bed,” and she printed it. After Wolf Skin came out, she asked me if I had anything else, and I sent her a series about Snow White and Rose Red I’d been working on for my eventual full-length collection. She published five Snow White and Rose Red poems in a beautiful spread, and I fell in love with the possibilities of surreal photography and poetry presented together. When Carolyn asked if I would like to start editing poetry for Faerie, I immediately said yes. I’m excited about the role I get to play at Faerie in bringing poetry to a larger audience.

I’m not sure I have any magical tips for avoiding fairy tale clichés, but there seem to me to be at least two aspects to this. The first aspect is linguistic: emerging poets should obviously strive for inventive and beautiful turns of phrase, precise and surprising diction, startling line breaks, and an interesting voice. All of these elements work together to make the texture of a poem feel fresh and new. The second aspect is ideological: emerging poets should also strive to avoid a clichéd approach. It’s not enough to convert an existing fairy tale or trope into inventive poetic language. It’s also important to think about how a poem builds somehow on the traditional tale or trope and/or subverts it. It seems to me that the best fairy tale poetry strikes a balance between the strange and familiar. Two poems we recently accepted for the summer 2016 issue illustrate this concept: John W. Sexton’s “The Man with the Ladder of Loneliness” is an inventive, original fabulist poem that manages at the same time to seem familiar and resonant, and E. Kristin Anderson’s “Selkie” updates an old myth in an inventive way (in this poem, the titular creature carries lip gloss and a driver’s license). Readers can check both of those poems out in the summer issue by signing up for a subscription.


Do you prefer coffee or tea?

Coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon. I am incorrigibly addicted to caffeine.

The Big Easy, Big Ideas, and Brandon Black

For some time now, I've had the pleasure of knowing Brandon Black, a New Orleans-based writer of fantasy and science fiction. He has the particular distinction of being the editor of New Orleans' first locally-written and produced steampunk and gaslamp fantasy anthology, New Orleans By Gaslight. 

He has a terrific sense of story that's inclusive and expansive, and his posts on other areas of genre always give me something to think about. He's one of the nicest guys I know, and I see many similarities between our experiences and influences growing up. I had the chance to interview him this month in the middle of his busy schedule of writing and making it all work out down in the bayou.

Be sure to visit his website at: http://brandonblackonline.com!

How did you get inspired to take up writing? Who are some of the writers who are enduring influences upon you?

My life has been woven through with stories. I learned to read from comic books. When we'd go over to my grandparents' house, I'd pull out this huge cardboard box of Golden Age comic books under my uncle's bed and just read for hours. I've never understood why they push such dry material on kids in school. Comic books got me to the point where I could read by the time I reached kindergarten and so they kicked me up into the first grade and even when I got there, I took reading class with the second graders. The Legion of Superheroes, the Avengers, the Green Lantern Corps and the Justice League are only a million times more interesting than "See Jane run."

My father was a physicist and he's the one who introduced me to science fiction (when I was a boy, he gave me an inflated astronaut instead of a teddy bear.) When I was old enough to understand it, we'd watch Doctor Who together on PBS. That's still one of my fondest memories of my father. But I'd have to say anime was the biggest early influence on me other than comic books. I remember the epic story of Space Battleship Yamato (Star Blazers here in the States), a crew of desperate young people making a trip of a hundred and eighty thousand light years, out to the Magellanic Cloud and back, in just one Earth year, with the goal of saving all life on Earth. That's a story!

I still remember that awesome moment in Robotech when I heard the narrator say, "Meanwhile, twenty light years away..." A transition. A simple transition between scenes and I was awestruck. This was a story of such scale, such scope that meaningful events were occuring simultaneously twenty light years distant from each other. I think that's when I started wondering if I myself could write science fiction.

As for authors whose work I revere, let's see: Larry Niven, Jack Vance, John M. Ford, Scott Cunningham, Louie Martinie, J. R. R. Tolkien, Grant Morrison, Alan Moore, Douglas Adams, G. R. R. Martin, and Neil Gaiman.

What’s your next big project you want to take on as a writer?

I want to write a huge sprawling epic of a novel. I want to write one of those three hundred and sixty thousand word books that panting for breath you can report to the police that you managed to bludgeon your attacker to death with because you had no other weapon with which to defend yourself.

I want to write a Great and Mighty Book worthy of Douglas Adams' line "and with a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at his single word of command..." Yes! That's the sort of book I want to write! But I'm not ready. I'm not ready as a writer and I'm not at the point where I would need to be in my career. I can't imagine there's a publisher anywhere that would take a three hundred thousand word novel from a new author. They'd insist on cutting it into three books and making a trilogy of out it and that would really just kill my enthusiasm for it. I want to write an epic work, an integral work that reads as a single novel from beginning to end, despite its length.

And there's that other annoying minor point that I haven't finished a novel yet at all. I have a steampunk novel that I'm writing and I need to finish it. Once it's done, then I can start looking to writing something longer.

New Orleans has a strong literary tradition. In what ways do you feel that’s impacted your approach to writing?

Rather than sound bitter, I'll just say that while New Orleans does have a very strong literary tradition and there are many people of letters who are passionate about writing and literature here, that doesn't mean they are passionate about science fiction and fantasy. I received little to no support or encouragement from my instructors or most of my fellow students in creative writing classes, save for Dr. Blackwood at LSU. The rest of my instructors at various points actively tried to dissuade me from writing science fiction. One of them, a full professor and at one point head of his college's creative writing department said that he didn't understand science fiction so he didn't allow his students to write it.

Can you imagine ANY other genre where an instructor, a full professor, could get away with saying something like that? "I've never really understood Westerns, so I don't allow anyone in my classes to write them." They would have laughed him off campus! In his defense, and I never thought I would say those words, I wound up creating the New Orleans Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Circle for much the same reason. I had participated, eagerly and productively, in a writers' circle at East Bank Jefferson Library but had begun to notice as my work progressed that increasingly comments from the rest of the circle had begun to taper off. Whereas I had before received useful criticism about this or that story and where it needed to be changed, particularly as I began to settle on steampunk as my genre of choice, criticism devolved into "good story as always." And while that's appreciated, it's not useful.

As for New Orleans' fandom, the difference between them and the ivory tower has been like night and day. Fandom's been incredibly supportive of my work going all the way back to when I wrote Star Trek fanfic for the Krewe of the Enterprise newsletter. I've given panels on steampunk at Mobicon in Mobile, CoastCon in Biloxi and I've been a regular guest at CONtraflow here in New Orleans for the past several years. Fandom's been very good to me and I appreciate it.

Fandom here is why I dream of making New Orleans a great literary mecca for science fiction. Starting the Writers' Circle and the By Gaslight anthology series are just the opening moves. What I'd like to see here one day is a thriving science fiction and fantasy literary society giving out its own yearly awards, a quarterly journal of fantasy and science fiction based out of New Orleans and a yearly "Best Of" of New Orleans' science fiction and fantasy. I want to give back to local fandom all it's given me.

Being a writer is a tough process, and this year has been a little more rough for you than most. Can you tell us a little about what’s happening? 

After Katrina, I evacuated to Hendersonville, North Carolina and then to Decatur, Georgia and finally to Mobile, Alabama. I lost my job in Mobile and moved back to New Orleans. My job search was pretty abysmal and so I hit upon the idea of making a go as a professional writer. I hadn't written much of anything in years and I had pretty much given up on the dream of being a full-time author. But I wasn't finding much in the way in the local job market, so I decided to buckle down and do some writing. And I achieved some great early successes. I had a story story published in Dark Oak Press' Dreams of Steam III and another in Seventh Star Press' A Chimerical World: Tales of the Seelie Court. I pitched the idea for New Orleans By Gaslight on my Facebook account and it's like the project slipped from my fingers and started rolling downhill from there. I was just entertaining the notion of doing an anthology and people were responding with "I've already started my story!"

New Orleans By Gaslight wound up being a big success, with the Times-Picayune running an article on the book and the East Bank Jefferson Parish Library throwing us a book release party. Things were looking good. But then, my health worsened and my car died. I should have put the brakes on trying to further my writing career and started looking for more conventional employment then. But I'd had this idea for a non-fiction book, something I'd been working on and off on since before Hurricane Katrina. I still had some savings and I was very confident about how my career was going and the profits that could be made from a nonfiction book. My researches had indicated that the industry standard was to pay an author an advance up front after accepting the book proposal and then work with the author to finish the book.

I was wrong. Very, very wrong. Publisher after publisher loved my book proposal. That too helped dig me deeper. Even when publishers declined to accept the project, they praised my writing and told me my book proposal was the best they'd ever read and it was only a matter of time before some company picked up the project. But no one did. At least, no one offering an advance. Months had gone by and the money I was counting on never came. Three publishers in the end contacted me interested in the book but none of them offered a cash advance and by that time, my financial need was pretty desperate. I couldn't even get an agent to intercede on my behalf. All my research had said that the easy, instant way to get an agent was to do everything yourself -- come up with an idea, write the sample chapters, identify publishers who printed material similar to what you were pitching, put together a book proposal and send it out to said publishers, all in the hopes of being able to say to an agent: "Look, I've got a publisher who's sent me a contract for my book, I just need someone to negotiate for me."

What I discovered was that if the publishers didn't mention a specific amount of money as an advance, that no agent was willing to take the gig. Their assumption was if they didn't offer X amount of money up front, the Y amount the agent might be able to convince them to part with wasn't enough for the agent to get out of bed for.

In the end, I was grateful to have an agent spell that out for me as too many other agents just said, "Great project but I don't think I'd be a good fit for it." I can't communicate the anger and frustration I felt, that I still feel, desperately needing money, having to turn to friends and family for my rent, for money for food and medicine, terrified of being homeless and all the while, sitting on a project that publishers and agents have said time and time again would be a lucrative success, is of great literary quality and worthy of publication, only to turn around and then say, "I don't feel like a good fit for it."

What are some of the great frontiers you feel more writers need to address in the coming years ahead?

Transhumanism is, as I see it, a great wall looming in science fiction's future. We're already living in the age of cyberpunk. We are fast approaching a time when people will be able to interface their brains directly with computers. I feel, at that point, that those people won't have much of anything in common with those of us who haven't experienced that and that that wall was and is a barrier to my literary interest. I can't imagine what it would be like to be a human being who could mentally slow time to microseconds and in that time, access the world's informational stockpile in order to make a decision.

What will a simple argument between boyfriend and girlfriend sound like when they both have computers in their heads downloading the internet? What will people care about, socially, politically, economically? When bickering about politics on Facebook is replaced with the instantaneous ability to fact check statements and download whole arguments, histories and philosophies in an instant, what will laws and human interaction even look like? What will entertainment look like? What will people care about?

Transhumanism offers to elevate humanity to godhood. And I suppose I'm too humble to want to write stories about real gods. When I do read and write about deities in fiction, it's humanized deities with goals and objectives and wants and desires that we as human beings have, not remote, incomprehensible abstract entities that have nothing in common with us because they've existed in some rarefied domain for millenia. When people move from being people to "being as advanced to us as we are to an amoeba" as Spock would say, how can we write about them? Why would you want to?

Bob argues with Rick about nth level transcendental hyper-dimensional tachyonic wave mechanics and how those wave dynamics replicate recurring patterns in hyper-time economics. Both Bob and Rick present computer simulations and studies based off those simulations -- that they've just now run in their heads -- to support their respective sides of the argument. I can't follow the argument. I can't follow their emotions. I can't follow their thought processes. An argument, a scene, that might change their lives forever might happen in the time I could blink. This crucible moment that led the two men to walk in different directions and work to change their society forever happened while I burped and tried to remember what I had for lunch. I don't know how to get past that wall.

What’s your advice for younger writers who are just getting started?

My advice to writers just getting started: Don't major in English. Don't pursue a creative writing degree. You can always take creative writing and literature classes as electives for another major. If you want to write science fiction, major in physics or engineering or computer science. You want a college degree that will help you put food on the table. You want a degree that will give you time and a comfortable lifestyle in order to write.

I majored in Military and Political Journalism and then got a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. I have only once in twenty years gotten a job specifically because of those degrees. All they've ever done for me otherwise was let me check the box next to "do you have a college degree?" on an application. By comparison, I knew a guy who got a four year computer programming degree and from the day he stepped off the college stage had a six-figure job, in his early twenties. That's more money in a single year than my parents made together any year of their lives. I knew another who worked in computers and made so much money that he only worked every other year to finance his bachelor's lifestyle.

My advice to you is to find a degree program that you'll be happy with that'll get you six figures and take creative writing classes on the side. Trust me. You'll be so much better off.

Starry Wisdom, the Dying Earth, and Toy Soldiers: An Interview with Simon Berman

Up in Seattle, there's a rather curious and interesting fellow I've known for some years now who passes through the waking world as Simon Berman. Our paths intersect in surprising ways, not the least of which being a love of books, forbidden knowledge, games, and the Cthulhu Mythos. Because of his work with Privateer Press, I became acquainted with their Warmachine Game, among other projects. One of those happens to be his ambitious Book of Starry Wisdom that came about from his desire to hold a book of H.P. Lovecraft's works that felt as ominous as the storied Necronomicon. 

When he approached me about the possibility of being a contributor, I said yes without hesitation because I know he "gets it" as much as this subject can be "gotten". 

In any case, between both of our harried schedules and any number of unusual mishaps, bizarre circumstances and anomolies warping time, space and mere reality, we finally had a chance to discuss his path and influences, and I found myself even more excited than ever to work with him. Be sure to check out his blog at A Love Letter To Atrocity, and do consider backing The Book of Starry Wisdom. 

You always have so many projects going on at once. What are your top three at the moment you're really excited about?

 Right now, The Book of Starry Wisdom is obviously the center of my world. After that, it's an ongoing project that I've been helping to manage for almost two years now, Eliza Gauger's Problem Glyphs. As for a third, well it's for my day job at Privateer Press and I can't talk about it publicly right now!


How do you describe your job to your family?

"I get paid to Tweet about toy soldiers."


You're involved in many parts of science fiction and fantasy, but particularly with the works of H.P. Lovecraft. How did you first get introduced to his work? And what's your favorite H.P. Lovecraft story?

I actually first encountered Lovecraft in a somewhat roundabout way. It would have been somewhere around 1993 when I was a very enthusiastic Metallica fan. I had listened to all their music at that point, so I had already encountered their songs "The Call of Ktulu" and "The Thing That Should Not Be," but I didn't understand what they were about. I ended up reading a biography of the band which devoted a paragraph or so to their fascination with Lovcraft's stories. Being a certain breed of heavy metal and roleplaying game nerd, it more or less ensured that the next book I picked up was a Del Rey collection of Lovecraft's stories, one of the ones with the amazing Michael Whelan covers, and I was hooked right there.

As for my favorite Lovecraft story, it has got to be The Dunwich Horror. It has all the elements that I love in his work; remote villages, degenerate families, ancient books, people turning into monsters, alien gods, and cosmic peril. Lovecraft wrote more effective stories and explored those ideas in greater depth elsewhere, but for me, The Dunwich Horror is the whole package.


Who do you consider some of your personal literary role models? Who would you consider your strangest influence?

Lovecraft goes without saying, but this is a tough one. My mother is from England and I grew up reading a lot of British fiction. My parents didn't really bother to curate the books available to me by age appropriateness which I think benefited me in a lot of ways.

I'd read all of George Macdonald Fraser's Flashman novels by the time I was twelve, and that love of history and black humor made a huge impact. Fraser brought history to life in those books like no one else and I'd kill to have a faction of his ability. Gerald Durrel's memoirs are a touchstone for me, and were a real force multiplier on my love of natural history as a child.

As for more contemporary writers, I'd be remiss not to mention Alan Moore and Michel Houllebecq. Houllebecq's The Possibility of an Island is some of the best contemporary not-quite-science fiction I've read, which also reminds me that I should mention my recent love of Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach trilogy. But then I feel like I'm doing Michael Moorcock a disservice for not mentioned dozens of his novels, and also Jack Vance's Dying Earth, and I could go on, is what I'm saying.


Are there any specific writers at the moment you feel we underappreciate? 

Well, now that you mention it and I already mentioned him, Jack Vance. Vance laid so much groundwork for modern science fiction and fantasy and outside of roleplaying game circles he's just not very well known. One of these days someone at HBO or AMC is going to find his Dying Earth or Lyonesse stories and he'll get the appreciation he's due, I hope.

After nearly a century, there's still an ongoing fascination with the work of H.P. Lovecraft. But are we coming close to exhausting the directions we can go with his work and the Cthulhu Mythos?

I don't think so. There are some tropes that are getting really tired by this point but I think the nature of his work is going to lend itself to dramatic reinterpretations for as long as people are telling stories.

The virtue of having so many "indescribable" horrors and so forth means that every creator gets to put their own stamp on them. I could do without seeing another ripped muscle man with a squid head, but I think as long as people are examining, deconstructing, and engaging with his stories and themes we're going to keep getting exciting new takes on the Mythos.


What's your advice for a beginner who is interested in getting involved with writing?

Write for pleasure. Write whenever you can. Get a job that isn't writing for a while and it will make you appreciate the writing that you do in your spare time all the more. There's a lot to be said for writing for a living but don't jump in the deep end on that, I've seen so many people turned bitter at the craft itself because they were struggling to get by on the sad rates that are just the reality for a starting writer.

Do what you have to do to keep yourself from hating it and, if you're determined to improve your work, willing to make connections, and a little bit lucky, success of some sort will likely follow.


When are you most excited with a project?

The immediate answer I had was"at the beginning," but on second thought it's when I start to really pull the project together. When it's at a point where it's coalesced enough and I'm confident enough in it that I can start talking about it with people in my inner circle. Most of my projects never get to that point.

I tend to hoard ideas for a while, what Warren Ellis calls the "compost bin" method. You think deeply on the idea for a little while, a few days, a week, make notes, obsess over it, and then you put it away. Don't think about it for a month. When you come back to it you see if the refuse has turned into fertilizer. If it does, I start work in earnest. That's when I get excited.


What's a personal rule you set for yourself as a writer?

Don't talk about things you haven't written yet. It's easy to spout a half-baked idea to your friends online and get distracted by the excitement instead of actually writing the god damn thing.



Check out The Book of Starry Wisdom at: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aeeth/the-book-of-starry-wisdom-apocrypha-of-lovecrafts/ The campaign ends November 1st!