Every year at the end of the year I post a review of all the articles, poems, stories, and books I’ve published that year. 2019 was a big year for me in writing. While I felt like I wasn’t getting a lot done, I was surprised when I looked back and realized I really had written a great deal.

Most of my time was spent working on two novels-in-progress. But I did manage to send out some poems for publication too. I’m very honored by the editors who recognized and published my work. Here’s to 2020 and another year of writing.

Books
Glimmerglass Girl — Won the Elgin Award for best speculative chapbook
Numinous Stones — To be published in Italian in 2020 by Kipple Press

Poems
The 2019 Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association Contest, Winner: Short Form Category: The Fox and the Forest (Erasure of Ray Bradbury)
The 2019 Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association Contest, Winner: Long Form Category: The Mining Town
Apparition Lit #8 (October 2019) — Belly of the Beast
Mirror Dance Issue 44 (Spring 2019) — Farewell Dead Men
Not One of Us #61 (April 2019) — ​A Book Is a Tomb and Words Are Souls
The Avenue: Issue V: Music (April 2019) — Chopin Falls in Love with the Night (1827–1846)
The Knicknackery Issue 6 (February 2019) — Bayou Dream
Dreams & Nightmares Magazine (Issue #111, January 2019) — An Unknowing Breach of the Law
Kaleidotrope (Winter 2019) — “All the Glory of Her Earthly Shell”

On Writing:
Medium (12/18/19) — My NaNoWriMo Was a Mess
Writing Hacks (11/27/19) — Tricking Yourself into Writing
Bulletproof Writers (11/28/19) — The End of the Year Sometimes Sucks for Creatives
Storymaker (11/25/19) — Reluctantly Writing About Death
Interstellar Flight Press (11/15/19) — Defying Genre in The Dream House
Daily Muse Books (10/24/19) — NaNoWriMo Isn’t Just for Books
Medium (10/15/19) — Does Publishing Short Stories Matter?
Medium (9/4/19) — The Writing Life: An Infographic
Medium (8/28/19) — 40 Writing Milestones to Celebrate
Medium (8/21/19) — Queries, Contributors, and Common Terms: An A-Z glossary for submitting writing
Horror Writer’s Association Newsletter (7/1/19) — Darkness & Light
​Medium (5/16/19) — Fighting Rejection & Imposter Syndrome
Medium (5/3/19) — Switching Genres
​Medium (4/3/19) — Creating a Writer’s Mission Statement
​Medium (3/27/19) — NaPoWriMo: A Poet’s Challenge
​Dream Foundry (3/14/19) — The Cone of Silence
​Medium (3/11/19) — These are a Few of My Favorite Rejections
​Medium (1/31/19) — Forming a Critique Group 101

​Stellar news today! My poem "The Fox and the Forest" (an erasure of Ray Bradbury) is the winner of the SFPA: Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association contest short form and my poem "The Mining Town," is the winner in the long form category! Very much bowled over by the judge's kind comments on my poems:
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"Hybridity brings in endless possibilities when it comes to crafting and interpreting creative work, and these short pieces showcase the complexity of hybrid, speculative poetry."

"When the container for our work is expanded, there’s room to explore braided narratives. These longer poems convey multiple specific stories while still opening themselves up for the audience to imprint their own experiences onto the work."

The Mining Town
by Holly Lyn Walrath

is all bric-a-brac now. Tourists cram into houses-turned-stores, drink beer on the corners from the new microbrewery in the old mill, buy sweatshirts that say “I mined the deep and all I got was this stupid shirt,” but few take the walk up there, into the hills. It’s better to stay down here, safe among the ghosts of houses, to plunder their wares with big white thumbs and buy things, there are always more things to buy in a ghost town.

What happened to this town?


The Church

bell rings at dawn and dusk. The men paint the white brick black and red roof black and burn the picket fence. They stand to survey their work, cigarettes dangling from their slack jaws, hands black with pitch. At home, they do not wash the darkness away with silver soap but place those hands on the bodies of wives and backsides of children and hips of back-alley lovers and blank pieces of paper longing for ink. You must remember, this was a different time.

Why did they paint the church black?


The General Store

at first sold normal goods. Tack and seed, hay and hen egg. Slowly, strange objects appeared upon the shelves. A single deer’s antler, painted gold. Ant farms, pre-made, the little red bodies within tunneling deeper and deeper. A dozen wooden tokens carved with other Gods. Silver machines, alien in origin. Jars of body parts. Flower buds encased in glass. Japanese swords. The souls of men disguised in clock faces. Irony. Joy. Peace, if you could afford it.

Where did the objects come from?


The Library

There is no library. It sank into the ground years ago. Perhaps an industrious young man might dig his way down, find it deep beneath the sod and worms, and crawl in through a back window, left open by the librarian on a summer’s day, to bring in a bit of the fresh mountain breeze, and there he might find her still, humming a bit, rocking in her chair behind the card catalog, waiting for someone to ask for a book.

Why is there no library?


The Abandoned Mine

The most prominent feature being the stores of abandoned ore. Some piled in carts like great mounds of jewels, other still half-buried in the walls, their shiny faces masks waiting to be removed and to reveal the monster within. Once, the ore was necessary to the planet’s deepest life, and once, it was necessary to human life. Now, it’s merely lonely. It creeps out in tendrils, seeding its jeweled body through the earth, down the path, to the town. It puts out feelers in tidy bed and breakfast gardens, a blue-flame flower here, a ruddy weed there, in with the wheat in the farmer’s fields and creeping through the cracks of the brick on the cobblestone streets.

Why is the ore no longer needed?


The Trail Leading Away from the Mine

is overgrown with brush and wing, birds hopping along moss-covered logs, blooming glens of clover where bunnies forage, deep tufts of ash from the death trees, who burn each night in twilight and then like the phoenix, regrow each morning. The ash is the bodies of those long gone souls—yet a bit of their yearning still remains. The fire is the mountain’s heart rained down. And every curse it whispers is made new again, every morning it awakes forgetting what it forgot.

Why do the trees burn?


The Tenement Roofs

are where the miners went to smoke, and sometimes drink, when their wives didn’t want them around, which was often. Their feet dangled over the edges, all in a row. They said nothing to each other, nothing, except to whisper, “You see the blue light?” and one would say in response, “Aye, I seen the blue light, down in the depths, I seen it.”

Who was the first to follow the light?


The Drummer Boy

used to play on the corner for ha’pennies, picking out a rhythm on his bone-cage banjo and tapping the beat with his foot on his man-skin drum. He made a deal with the devil before such things became unnecessary and then he got curious, and when a boy gets curious all hell breaks loose. He followed the men and picked out each one for the killing, and then ran to the bridge where the bats roosted to tell them the news. They listened, curious, and then swarmed out into the twilight on the hunt.

What were they hunting?


The Foreman

was afraid of the dark. He sent his men down to the caves and tunnels with only a canary and other men for company and he expected no philandering with either, but he never laid eyes on the ore in his own life time. He watched them leave his little cabin, one by one, walk up the trail and disappear into the maw, and he turned away, turned the crank on his music box, and listened to Clementine over and over again. Oh my darling, he sang, oh, oh.  

Who gave the foreman his music box?


The Devil

tends the local pub. But he never seemed to have any purpose except to serve another round. He was lonely, dreadfully lonely. His lover died and he kept her picture over the till and dared any man to look upon it without weeping. He once lived in a brighter place, was once a wealthy man with bigger plans. But the devil didn’t realize that once he’d won out, he’d be bored. Now he poisons the well out back with his tears, only a few each night. It’s the least he can do.

Who loves the devil?

I am honored to announce that my chapbook, Glimmerglass Girl, is the winner of the 2019 SFPA Elgin Award for best speculative poetry chapbook. I am grateful to the SFPA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association) voting members for supporting this little book of weird poems about womanhood. 

Get your copy here . . .