(Kinda) Sunday recs

Published on by Sara Norja Category: flash fiction, linkage, novelette, personal babble, poetry, short stories

It’s past midnight but I’m still calling this Sunday recs because I haven’t gone to bed yet. Days, this is how they work. I’ve been good and gone to sleep before 1am for the past couple of nights, but it’s not going to happen today. But for a good reason: I’ve spent six hours editing a novelette (start to finish) and didn’t finish till past 11pm, after which I had to make the dinner that I’d neglected making earlier. Only now am I full enough and coming down from the writing high enough to even consider bed.

Anyway, enough babbling. Here’s some fairytale-themed pieces that I’ve enjoyed:

Fitting In by Katrina Robinson (in Enchanted Conversation: A Fairy Tale Magazine): this is a pretty awesome Cinderella poem – from the shoe’s point of view!

The Faerie Tailor by Suzanne J. Willis (in Goldfish Grimm’s Spicy Fiction Sushi): gorgeous flash piece, such lyrical prose.

Recognizing Gabe: un cuento de hadas by Alberto Yáñez (in Strange Horizons): this is such an amazing story! A powerful, beautiful story of a trans kid with a fairy godmother.

Poetry World Cup 2014

Published on by Sara Norja Category: competition, linkage, poetry, promotion

The Missing Slate is organising a Poetry World Cup!

The competition involves 32 poems by poets representing 32 different countries. All of the poems have been previously published in the magazine. There’s a poetry match every day till July 13th, and you can help pick the winner each day by voting on the website. The world cup proceeds from first round to quarterfinals etc.

This is a super fun invention, and much more relevant to my interests than the football world cup. 😀 If you feel like reading good poetry from international voices, go forth to The Missing Slate and vote for your favourite.

Women Destroy Science Fiction! (in which I also blather about other books)

Published on by Sara Norja Category: books, flailing, linkage, personal babble

Lightspeed Magazine’s special issue Women Destroy Science Fiction! is now available as an ebook! Huzzah! I just got myself a copy and am super excited about reading it. Wow! Such awesome, much destruct, so women.

So much to read! In addition to this special issue of Lightspeed, I’ve got the following books on my bedside book-table (yes, I have a separate one for books; before you imagine some towering edifice, it’s just a glorified stool):

  • Hild by Nicola Griffiths. I’m in the first third of this book – such beautiful writing!
  • William Shakespeare’s Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope by Ian Doescher. Have been slowly reading this since Christmas. Awesome concept, quite funny, and usually well Shakespearified, but the misuse of the second person singular pronoun “thou” irks me (omg you cannot use “thou” to address more than one personnn).
  • Wonderbook by Jeff VanderMeer. I usually don’t like writing guides and such, but Wonderbook has some pretty good stuff. I’ve been slow with getting through it because I want to concentrate on it properly when reading. It’s pretty awesome to read a creative writing guide that concentrates on speculative fiction instead of turning its nose up at it!
  • The Honey Month by Amal El-Mohtar; Here, We Cross edited by Rose Lemberg; and Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History edited by Rose Fox and Daniel José Older. I only just got this lovely trio of books, and haven’t begun reading them yet because I’m so excited about them that I want to give them my full attention. I suspect they will all make me cry with awesomeness.

And then there’s the growing number of unread books in my shelves. I’m trying to avoid the library right now because otherwise I just end up reserving loads of good books from there instead of reading my own. I ♥ the public library for the Helsinki metropolitan area – there’s a lot of good SFF books. But that means that whenever I come across a book I’m interested in online, I can reserve it from the library, and of course I have to read the library books first, and… neverending cycle. For now, I’ll just write down any interesting new titles and loan them from the library later on. I’ve got around 30 unread books waiting mournfully in my bookshelves: time to tackle them first. A task for this summer, perhaps!

In conclusion: booksss. We loves them, precious.

Niteblade #28 is now online!

Published on by Sara Norja Category: poetry, promotion, publication

Niteblade #28 is online here – titled after my poem 🙂

A snippet of my poem ‘Looking-Glass Lover’ is here. To get the whole issue free to read online, Niteblade relies on donations and purchases – so if you want to get the issue for everyone to read, consider buying yourself a super cheap .epub, .pdf or .mobi copy of the issue!

I’ll let you know when my poem is free to read in its entirety. But if you can’t wait, do get yourself a copy of the whole issue.

Poetry sales to Goblin Fruit

Published on by Sara Norja Category: flailing, poetry, publication

Some happy news: my poems ‘Shrug Charm’ and ‘Sorrow-stone’ will be published in the Spring and Summer issues of Goblin Fruit! I love Goblin Fruit – the issues are always gorgeous, well-thought-out and full of talented poets – so I’m pretty much over the moon to be published in such a lovely magazine.

I’ll post more about the poems (they both have quite distinct birth-moments) when the issues come out.

Sunday recs: Two poems, two stories

Published on by Sara Norja Category: linkage, poetry, short stories

Long time no Sunday recs. In my defence, the past month or so was intensively filled by doing PhD applications. Last weekend was my first in ages when I was free to do non-academia stuff, so I shamefully neglected my blog. But now! Rec time!

First let’s have an invocation to The God of Lost Things by Neile Graham (in Strange Horizons). The wordcraft here is wonderful, and I can picture the little god so vividly. This poem reminds me of intricate Anglo-Saxon and Celtic miniatures.

Then Hair by Hel Gurney (in Stone Telling). I have long hair – have had, for most of my life – and this poem really resonates with me. Hair holds so much cultural meaning; long hair, in particular, is a marker that no doubt usually gets me read as straight; and yet in the end, I wear my hair long for me. Gurney’s poem manages to catch some of my feelings about my hair (sans the implications of gender dysphoria) – amazing when poetry does that, shows your own self reflected in someone else’s words!

Now for the stories.

As you may know if you’ve read such poems by me as The Understanding, I have a major thing for fiction/poetry that uses the conventions of historical manuscripts and their editing as a literary device. Well, to my delight I discovered that the wonderful Amal El-Mohtar has written a story employing such conceits: The Green Book (in Apex Magazine). There’s a lot of subtle worldbuilding in this story that left me wondering and wanting more set in the story-world. I love how the story unfolds solely as a fragmented document – so well done. Also, I love the marginal notes. Manuscript-studies fiction ♥

My final rec of the day is The Astrologer’s Telling by Therese Arkenberg. This is a poetic apocalypse story with a really intriguing premise and a strong focus on the human experience and the characters despite the cataclysmic events. Astrology in science fiction!

Poetry sale: ‘The Alchemist’s Lover’

Published on by Sara Norja Category: personal babble, poetry, publication, scholarly meets writerly

I’m amused by the fact that my most recent publications both have ‘lover’ in the title. In other words: ‘The Alchemist’s Lover’ will be published in the next issue (‘Alchemies’) of CSHS. Yay!

I’m currently applying for a PhD, and since my data consists of some medieval English alchemical texts, of course I had to submit alchemy-inspired poetry to the ‘Alchemies’ issue. I’m really glad this poem in particular has found a home. The issue will be up very soon – I’ll post a link when it’s available!

(Now back to tweaking my research proposal. Editing is fun but challenging – in academic as well as creative writing.)

Sunday recs: inkscrawl

Published on by Sara Norja Category: linkage, poetry

inkscrawl is a delightful online publication dedicated to minimalist speculative poetry. The poems in it never fail to delight, and since I loved the newest issue (#7), I wanted to give it a shout-out.

Poems I especially enjoyed (but please do read the whole issue – it sings so well as a collection):

Queen of Cups by Adrienne J. Odasso – destiny and Tarot imagery, beautiful.

Bone Song by Mari Ness – a bone’s lament, a story in eight lines.

the explorer by Ross Balcom – this one is like a jolt of electricity to my heart.