I have a new poem up today at Liminality: A Magazine of Speculative Poetry. This poem is called “Acacia,” and it’s named after a plant commonly used in rituals and spellcraft.

Use to anoint torches and consecrate hope chests. Endows protection as well as psychic and mystical powers. If planted inside a fairy ring, it will bring prosperity to the closest home. If burned, it creates a hypnotic state that is often perilous.
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TW: This poem deals with illness and cancer.

Read the poem at Liminality

Agents and editors are looking for submissions that quickly set themselves apart. The stand-out submissions are fairly easy to locate. While all of slushing is somewhat subjective (as far as taste goes, we all have different loves and hates), I’ve noticed that there are a couple of things that are distinguishable between the stories I loved from a slush pile and the ones I passed over quickly.

Read the full article here . . .

When you were a child, white skulls used to follow you through the woods. You tried to catch a glimpse of them, but when you turned your head their skeleton bodies would disappear, fading into the canopy. Only their bone-voices remained, clacking through the trees, knick knack, knick knack . . .

Read the full story at Curious Fictions . . . 

I've read a lot of writing prompts in my time, and they all suck. Seriously. What is with this “Write a poem about a man who finds a dog on the side of the road and then he brings it home and then it eats his shoe . . .” prompt bull-honkey? (Okay, I made that prompt up, but that’s how most of them sound.)

Read the full article here . . . 

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I have a new poem up at the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association mag Eye to the Telescope. It’s called “Now the Patient Recounts the Houses in Her Mind.” This poem is inspired by the work of author Shirley Jackson. It’s a combination of The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

Read it here . . . 

We’re all being forced to slow down right now, and some of us are better at it than others. But I’ve noticed that writers, and creatives in general, are really, really bad at this.

Read the full post here . . . 

Thanks to J.A. Sullivan for reading the Coppice & Brake Anthology from Crone Girls Press, and this lovely review of my story "The Red Shoes."

One of the stories I enjoyed most, “The Red Shoes” by Holly Lyn Walrath, is a perfect example of unexpected twists. Walrath gives us a story of a lonely old witch in a deserted forest. You would expect that when the witch finds a lost girl (“A lovely redheaded thing curled in the litter of the forest floor like a fairy in bracken”), she would immediately make a meal of her, as the witch had done with so many other helpless children through the years. Yet she doesn’t. Obsessed with the past when trolls, werewolves, and other sorcerers called the woods home, the old woman casts a spell on a pair of red shoes for the girl. But magic rarely brings us the things we most desire, especially not without a hefty price. This was a beautifully written story with sharp images, and it reminded me of being a child, listening to Grimms’ Fairy Tales for the first time.

Read the full review here . . . 

So, I broke my knee in January. Which means that I have pretty much been inside for all of 2020. And you know what I’ve been doing? Catching up on trashy reality shows and finding comfort in soft things.

What I mean by that is media that doesn’t ask much of its viewers. Media that has all the feels, but none of the pain. That show that you go back to again and again, even if you feel like Netflix is judging you for watching it once more. We all have our favorite comfort movies and TV. I love edgy, dark, hard-edged things too. But we all need a little softness sometimes.

I know what you’re thinking. Wait a second, this is just a list of your favorite movies, isn’t it?

Why yes, yes it is.

Read the full article here . . . 

Last year in February I wrote 28 tiny love poems on post-its. Valentine’s Day is coming once again and I’ve once again decided to write a poem a day in February to celebrate. Last year I was surprised by how many people enjoyed my tiny poems. I guess there is something simple and sweet about the concept of love — and that translates well to short poems.

Read the full post here . . . 

I’m reading the poetry book submissions for Interstellar Flight Press, it occurs to me that a lot of writers struggle to put together poems for a collection. But when the right congregation of poems appears, it’s so exciting as an editor. Poems, when collected, have the ability to speak to each other in new and interesting ways not explored in their individuality.

Read the full article here . . . 

I am sharing excerpts from my new poetry chapbook over on my Instagram page, so I thought I would combine them here for easy reading. I will update this as new translations come in! My new chapbook is called Numinose Lapidi and it will be published soon by Kipple Press.

Read the full article here . . . 

When I was little, say four or five, I used to make my Mom write out things in cursive on little cards for me. I’d tell her what to write, then sit next to her at the coffee table in our den and watch her fingers and pen make the loops of cursive words, in neat lines with round letters. My mother has excellent penmanship. On the other hand, my father’s handwriting started out graceful and thin, but more spindly the older he got. Soon he switched to making block letters — in all caps. By the time the Parkinson’s had taken over, he was unable to write at all...

Read the full article at Coffeelicious . . . 

Do you ever think as humans we’re just afraid to get our hands dirty? That we’ve engineered our lives to be as perfect, pristine, and efficient as possible? And that maybe, if we aren’t perfect, then we’re failures?

I’m trying to abolish this idea from my creative life. The idea of perfection.

Read the full article here . . .

Around November, Writing Twitter starts talking about the end of the year. It’s NaNoWriMo, so people are often talking about writing anyway. But also, it’s the time of the year when, if you’re a writer in science fiction or fantasy, you should be posting your “What I Published This Year,” or “Awards Eligibility” post.

A lot of writers use this time to celebrate the works they’ve published over the year and encourage others to nominate them for best of lists and prize consideration, like the Pushcart Prize or Hugo Awards. Journal editors on the literary side announce their nominations for the Pushcart around this time. 2019 is also the end of a decade, so now people are also posting encouraging writers to share what they accomplished in the last decade. We’re sharing pics of ourselves in 2009 and 2019 to show the passage of time.

But I know that a lot of creatives struggle with all this.

Read the whole post here . . . 

I love the above image. It’s a photograph taken at Natural Bridge State Park, where someone has carved this quote from J.R.R. Tolkien into a walking path. J.R.R. Tolkien probably never imagined the life his work has taken on after his death — that someone would take the time to carve his words in a public space. In fact, I know he didn’t.

John Hendrix, an artist, recently posted a quote from Tolkien’s diary while he was writing Lord of the Rings. It reads:

Friday 14 April: ‘I managed to get an hour or two’s writing, and have brought Frodo nearly to the gates of Mordor. Afternoon lawn-mowing. Term begins next week, and proofs of Wales papers have come. Still I am going to continue “Ring” in every salvable moment.’

Read more here . . .

A year and a few months ago, my father died. Today, I signed a contract for a small poetry book on grief and dealing with my father’s death that is going to be translated into Italian and published in Italy. The world spins in weird ways, I guess.

Before my father died, I always looked on books about the death of a loved one in, I’ll admit, a pretty messed up and slightly dismissive way. I hated cancer memoirs, books that dived headfirst into the nitty-gritty details of death: bodies and hospitals and medicine and the grotesque humanity of grief. Also, there was a connotation with these books. When they were written by women about caring for loved ones, they often got lumped into women’s fiction, whereas a man writing about grief was somehow reinventing the wheel.

Read the full article on Medium . . . 

Confessions of a Supermassive Black Hole
You can’t escape my body.
I deform spacetime, invisible.
I collapse, even as everything surrounds me.
I am the center of you, of your galaxy.
I sieve particles, radiation, light,
searching for the ghost of my former self.
My gravity is also my weakness.
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I have a new early reveal post for subscribers at Curious Fictions. Last month I participated in Zinefest Houston — one of my favorite local events. In this event, local paper artists create zines to sell — small, hand-made, individual books, pamphlets, and other paper ephemera. I’ve participated twice and I always enjoy this well-crafted event (ba-dum cha). What I like about Zinefest is the audience. It’s mostly young people who are interested in meeting other writers and artists. It’s also one of the most diverse and well-attended events I go to every year. I always end up meeting some lovely folks!

Read the entire post here . . . 

It’s my favorite day of the year, so I thought I’d share a poem from my back catalogue of published work. This poem is an erasure/blackout of Shirley Jackson’s book We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

In case you’re unaware of this form, erasures are a type of found poetry where you “erase” words from a found text and the words left behind form a poem.

Read the poem here . . . 

I have a new poem in Apparition Lit #8 (October 2019) - Belly of the Beast. This one is kind of romantic, which I felt like fit the theme of the issue, Euphoria. What is euphoric to you? For me, it's being with the person you love in the weirdest place you can think of. 

Let’s live in the belly of the beast.
You can bring a strong IPA
so smooth it’s like milk frothed.
I’ll bring Atwood and Ishiguro and Dickens.
We’ll watch Netflix in the blood vessels 
and make love in the open mouth
with the krill and saltwater
pooling at our knees . . .

Read the entire poem here . . . 
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November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), an online community and yearly event where writers make the goal of writing 50,000 words in 30 days. This year, I’m encouraging you to burn the frigging thing down.

Read how here . . . 

I have a new article up at Medium today on the economics of short fiction, how commercialism is changing what writers write, & a bit of advice from Shirley Jackson.

“The very nicest thing about being a writer is that you can afford to indulge yourself endlessly with oddness, and nobody can really do anything about it, as long as you keep writing and kind of using it up, as it were.” — Shirley Jackson (“Memory and Delusion,” Published in Let Me Tell You.)​

Read the entire article here . . . 

What if you woke up tomorrow knowing without a doubt you could write a bestseller? Paint a picture worth a million dollars? Release an album that was guaranteed to go to #1 on the charts?

What would you do?

This is the question behind Yesterday, a charming movie that pays homage to the works of The Beatles by erasing them from the world. Yesterday is a “what if” movie — What if The Beatles never existed? Himish Patel (best known for his work on the British soap Eastenders) plays down-on-his-luck musician Jack Malik, who wants someone to like his music other than his best friend Ellie (played by Lily James).
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Read the entire article at Medium . . .