mariness

Going in and out of dizziness/vertigo today, which is both depressing and making it difficult to focus on much, but a couple of other things going on today:

1. The Madeleine L'Engle reread continues with A Wrinkle in Time. Much thanks to Catherynne Valente (catvalente) for insights with this one.

2. In related news, Tor.com is giving away A Wrinkle in Time Tote Bags -- all you have to do is comment on that post, and you're entered to win.

3. It will surprise nobody that so far, more people have commented on the tote bag than on the actual A Wrinkle in Time post. But this may change - as I noted last time, the comments on the L'Engle posts are more the slowly trickling in kind.

4. In other publishing news, my copy of Future Lovecraft, containing my poem "Do Not Imagine," finally arrived today and instantly attempted to attack a cat. No, really. (Though to be fair that was partly me being dizzy.) This is just in time for tonight's Future Lovecraft chat on Twitter. I'm not entirely sure what's happening here, but apparently it starts at 9 PM EST, 6 PM Pacific.

Future Lovecraft is available here, for Kindle here, here and for the Nook here, and through independent (yay!) bookstore Powells here. (It looks as if Powells is also selling an Adobe Digital Edition which works with the Nook.) Whew.

And with that I need to lie down for a bit to be ready for this chat. I'll also be answering comments on the Wrinkle in Time post later this evening.

The 40th issue of Abyss and Apex is out, and in it, my poem Frenzy.

"Frenzy" actually grew out of another poem entirely, a few lines that didn't quite work in the first poem, quite probably because they demanded a poem of their own. And, as poems do, they grew into a series; this is the first of the group to appear.

This is late because LJ has been hit by a DDOS attack and for whatever reason my account appears to be one of the last to return. On a related note, I am not intentionally ignoring everyone's comments; it's just that Lj won't let me answer your comments. Or, for that matter, let me comment on some of your journals. Anyway!

On a much, much happier note, Bull Spec issue 6 is now available in both print and PDF form! This issue features a little poem of mine, "Petals," but that isn't why you want the issue: you want it because it also contains short fiction and interviews with Lev Grossman (the Time Magazine reviewer turned major fantasy novelist) and Jeff and Ann Vandermeer (weird writers extraordinaire) and some other poems and is in general just a really cool zine.

This message will be repeated next week, since I fear it will get lost in the LJ issues, and there's no reason for anyone to lose out on Bull Spec just because some people decided to amuse themselves with a DDOS attack.

Edit: Not that this seems to be posting to LJ either...grr. I really do not want to have to set up a webpage yet, but that's looking increasingly necessary.

Between the royal wedding, the irreverent Twitter commentary on the royal wedding, the inane and unintentionally hilarious Fox News coverage of the royal wedding, the planned space shuttle launch, the cancellation of the space shuttle launch, and an accident with the coffee maker, I am incredibly out of it.

I feel I should say something here about Joanna Russ, award winning science fiction writer who reportedly passed away peacefully this morning in hospice care, but I am finding myself at a loss for words.

So, poem:

It is this, you see:
the terrifying emptiness of the edge of stars,
the shattering of blossoms beneath the wind,
the gasping for breath at the doorway, and darkness --

-- and between you and that darkness, the scattered words
half heard and half caught, pulsing, pulsing
pulling at your breath --

an explosion of birds
shatters the pale blue of the sky.

At one point I must have had some idea of writing a series of poems based on the voices of legendary or historical women. Here's another one, "The Wives." ( Cut for length again. )

This particular poem holds the record for fastest acceptance ever: It was accepted literally 15 minutes after I finished writing it.

Quite naturally, it ended up never getting published. These sorts of things happen, although it's always upsetting, and more so in this case because it wasn't that the publication folded, but changed editors – and the new editor declined the poem, something that's happened to me twice. Changing editors is part of the publication process, and often, I think, helpful - well, at least for readers - but it irks me when the new editor shows no respect for the previous editor's choices.

I took another look at it, and decided that it was simply too depressing of a poem – not surprising, given that it was written up from a nightmare, a nightmare that had spiraled out of a rather depressing evening.

I meant to post this yesterday, as a sort of Easter thing, but got sick. So, here you have it now. ( Cut for length again. Also it's depressing. You've been warned. )

More National Poetry Month.

*************

Like many people, I had a crazy – genuinely crazy – great aunt, and like many of these aunts, she had a story.

She was not actually my great aunt, but my great great aunt, my great grandmother's sister, who at some point in the 1920s had coolly announced, without any notice whatsoever, that she was heading off to be a missionary in China. According to family legend this went badly, with no one understanding or supporting either the missionary or the China part. My grandmother thought that it might have been to exorcise some guilt over the death of another sister, who had died at the age of ten, or perhaps to step out from under the shadow of more talented brothers and sisters. I don't know. In any case, off to China she went, there to work at a mission and pick up a set of china, which happens to be in the house now. It looks to me like pretty cheap stuff, mass produced in the 1930s, but the family took great pride in it – "This china is real China –" and I'm hoping to have it out and cleaned up for occasional tea use by the end of the year because it looks pretty cool and colorful and the tea cups are the delightfully correct size.

Anyway. Things apparently went well enough until the Japanese invasion, where things went haywire. Various family accounts survive, with the general consensus that everyone begged the aunt to leave, like, now. Helen did not leave, not quite yet. Family legend disagrees about why – aunt Ruth, who was in no position to actually know, said that Helen had already lost her mind, and the other aunt Ruth*, also in no position to actually know, said that Helen was completely sane, just hated the rest of the family and didn't want to see them.

But she did flee the communists when they arrived to her part of China, and ended up fleeing China and trying to return back to the United States in the middle of World War II, in about the worst possible time to attempt to cross the Pacific. According to one story, she didn't actually try to cross the Pacific – instead, she went the other way around, across the Indian Ocean and around the edge of Africa and across the Atlantic which honestly could not have been much easier.

Whichever route she took, at some point, she and her shipmates saw a ship burning on the ocean. She told my mother this, saying it was one of the things she most remembered about the war. My mother told me, and the story lingered in my mind.

Once permanently back in the States – she did want to return, but encountered problems with communists – she did lose her mind completely to a seeming combination of dementia and paranoid schizophrenia. She spent the last years of her life convinced that the communists were stalking South Florida in search of her and trying to kill her, and alarmed various people by suddenly shouting "COMMUNIST" or accusing various people of being Chinese spies, and on a few exciting occasions mistaking Cuban exiles for Chinese Communists, which went very badly indeed. She was eventually institutionalized in Dania, in a place that, she told my grandmother, harbored Chinese spies everywhere (no one else appears to agree.) I apparently met her from time to time – we have photos – but despite these stories, she seems to have made no impression upon me whatsoever; I remember her sister, but not her, even though the pictures show all three of us, with me looking sulky and miserable.

Eventually this all simmered into a poem. I was never entirely satisfied with it, but I did send it out, and it was actually accepted for publication at two different journals who both folded before publication (the story of much of my writing career), at which point I decided that it was kinda cursed and withdrew it from circulation, although I've shared it with friends here and there.

( Villanelle alert! )

So in an effort to distract myself from just how much today sucked (seriously, quite apart from falling in the post office, the highlight may have been finding out that a banker in Seattle, Washington, knows precisely how tall I am along with some other information that I don't recall ever handing over to Chase Bank, which provided a nice chilling sort of feeling), I've decided to focus on something a bit different: National Poetry Month.

Over at his blog, time_shark has been celebrating by offering a selection of previously published poems along with some notes and explanations about each. I'm going to be trying something a bit different – posting some old poems that for one reason or other were either never published or published in extremely obscure outlets and only read by a few friends, if that.

This is the first, "Jane," a poem I never bothered to submit anywhere for two reasons: one, it wasn't genre, and therefore would need to make the long, slow rounds of the poetry journals – and I had nothing else at the time to submit with it, and two, I wrote it shortly before I started working at the university – putting my entire writing career on hold for a few years.

Looking at it now, I'm struck by three things: one, that this is a pathway untaken, that is, poetry with a more "literary" than fantastical bent; two, my fascination with the Tudors really never ends, does it?; and three, I've apparently been a long time user of the phrase "only of." Something to watch for.

Because it's long, I'm putting it under a cut. ( Here you go. )

Every once in a great while, I write a poem that entirely satisfies me.

More about this poem later, but while you're there, do take a moment to check out the rest of the issue, which as always is breathtakingly beautiful, and includes work by cristalia, rose_lemberg, Neile Graham, Michelle Muenzler and others.

The goblins have completed their preparations for winter revels, which includes my little poem, Transformation. Lots of other delights in this most recent issue of Goblin Fruit. Enjoy!