30 January 2011

I'm not dead

I've just been writing a lot. It does come in waves, I've noticed. Hopefully I'll get more reading done next week.

I've got one story out for submission. I'm getting ready to put another one out next week. I've also got a story up for workshop, I cut it down to 6000 from 7200 last week. That one needed lots of work!

Currently Reading
Fantasy:
Scholarly: Wizardry & Wild Romance, A Study of Epic Fantasy - Michael Moorcock
Writing:

Submissions out
Flash: 0
Short: In The Business of Rotting to The Pedestal Magazine
Agent: 0

Workshoping:
The Making

13 January 2011

Low-Residency MFA Resource--Now availible

Shortly after I graduated from Seton Hill University with my MA in writing, I responded to a help a reporter query from Lori A. May who was writing a book about low-residency MFA programs.

I told her how awesome the SHU program was and shared my many wonderful experiences. A few other Alumni and faculty responded as well.

The Low-Residencey MFA Handbook is now availible! If you are looking into going for an MFA in writing, go read it (especially the parts about SHU)!

This entry is cross posted at Greater Portland Scribists

Currently Reading
Fantasy:
Scholarly: Wizardry & Wild Romance, A Study of Epic Fantasy - Michael Moorcock
Writing:

Submissions out
Flash: 0
Short: 0
Agent: 0

Workshoping:
Beyond the Cemetery

05 January 2011

A Celebration of Poetry

I am still reveling in the afterglow of Sandra Kasturi’s collection of poems, The Animal Bridegroom.

I have forgotten how much I enjoy poetry, and I think, my roots in poetry along with that. When I was working on my BFA in writing I took a lot of poetry workshops and really developed a likening of the compressed meaning, the careful arrangement of words, and particularly enjambment in good poems. I mostly love the short lined poems with lots of punch. In fact my favorite poems have been but a few lines, poignantly spaced with masterful diction, like The Primer by Christina Davis (which can be found here).

Most of my exposure to poems came when I worked as an Editorial Assistant at Alice James Books. For two years, I was constantly exposed to tons of award winning poetry. But… But, almost none of it focused on the mythology that I loved, the fantastical visions and traditions that were firmly lodged in my mind. When I left that job, I found very little poetry that even caught my interest (I was also in grad school, which might have had something to do with it).

Then, one day when I was checking out ChiZine news I found it pimping The Animal Bridegroom (Sandra is on their staff). So, I like a lot of stuff this magazine/publisher puts out. The cover was intriguing to me. Two colors, sepia with white text and image: a frame of wild flowers and woodland creatures around a bride and groom. The Bride in traditional/folk garb and the groom a wolfman or foxman with a nice tailed-coat. So I clicked on the link to amazon and read some of the poems. I thought they were fantastic. But it cost about $13 so I put it in my favorites list for when I got a gift card or someone looked there for my birthday.

I didn’t have to wait that long. Short after my discovery and longing for these poems, my eyes spied that gorgeous cover at the ChiZine table at Readercon. I made a beeline for it. I was so focused on it; I almost missed the fact that Sandra herself was manning the table at the time.

So to get the embarrassment over quickly, I gushed in fannish glee for about two minutes while she signed my book (which was not $13 bucks at the table).

I kept the book in my to-read stack, which was on my desk and rather close at hand. So, for the last six months or so, I’d periodically thumb through and read a poem or a few lines. I enjoyed that, some quick hits of a good thing. I’d like to note here that it’s not so easy to do that with a novel.

But towards the end of 2010 I thought I should read it cover to cover, net it into my year. So I did.

The Animal Bridegroom is full of everything I love about poetry with all the mythological and folkloric references I could hope for. Short lines pried meaning out of folk archetypes applied to modern day. Old characters exemplified the harsh qualities of modern life. Fantastic images asked questions about humanity. There was even a poem about the gemstone amber, one of my favorite “stones.” One even asked some serious questions about what happened to Hansel and Gretel after they grew up. And others, well, I’d like to be friends with some of those characters.

I am still reveling in the afterglow of Sandra Kasturi’s collection of poems, The Animal Bridegroom.



Currently Reading
Fantasy:
Scholarly: Wizardry & Wild Romance, A Study of Epic Fantasy - Michael Moorcock
Writing:

Submissions out
Flash: 0
Short: 0
Agent: 0

Workshoping:
The Tribe that Laughed

03 January 2011

The Etched City

One fantastic book after another! Whatever I read next has some tough shoes to fill...

I finished reading K. J. Bishop’s The Etched City at quarter past eleven on New Year’s Eve. I captured the whole experience in 2010. Truth is I wanted to finish this book and add it to my list for 2010, but in the end, I just couldn’t put it down!

I loved being a fly on the wall in this dark, hungry city--watching the ugly world do its worst and the people do what they could to survive. This is no tale of good versus bad. In fact the good get nothing, and the bad only get worse. The language itself was beautiful; the prose carefully written to fully expose the dark underbelly of a city that I don’t think had a lighter side. Instead of racing through this volume, I read it slow (when I could) to enjoy the images and emotions evoked by the story.

Survival, redemption, faith, ethics, biological experimentation, conscience, the extremes of artistic expression are all explored in a city of corruption. This city is Ashamoil (the word reminds me of toil, which is what its inhabitants do). Yet the city is many worlds between which only few people seem to travel. It is an industrialized factory-driven place with thriving remnants of the old ways. We rarely see the factories, what we do see is a surreal, wonderfully disturbing, yet rich tapestry of life and walking myth and only enough magic used to make it that much more hopeless. The place is what the characters made it, and what they made of it.

Bishop spins this tale from characters who are under a shadow, and who may have never known light: they murder, indulge in all the vices (whores, opium, booze, drugs), steal, slave, etc. For this, the story reveals things of darkness in many shades of gray. There seems to be nothing a “good” person could do in Ashaoil to improve their lives. The few who seek to improve their lot do so by dying or by leaving Ashamoil.

I found an interesting use of Point of View characters in The Etched City. Different main characters were prominent in different parts of the book. Raule, the good-doctor-to-the-poor, was most prominent at the beginning. But, later, Gwynn, the remorseless mobster and gunslinger bore more attention. Going between these two, we got the whole view of the city, gold to gutter. And periodically, we got snippets of the tale through the eyes of others in the middle, who knew some things we needed to know. This is not something I see very much in fiction. Bishop does it well, we knew who all the characters were before we jumped into their heads. Bishop used this method of switching POV to evoke a maximum of suspense, and it worked on me.

The art, and the hunger of this corrupted city charmed me. To put it in perspective, I'll say that a friend loaned it to me, and I’m going to go out and buy it for myself, in paper format.


Currently Reading
Fantasy:
Scholarly: Wizardry & Wild Romance, A Study of Epic Fantasy - Michael Moorcock
Writing:

Submissions out
Flash: 0
Short: 0
Agent: 0

Workshoping:
The Tribe that Laughed