linkage

Academic and creative

Published on by Sara Norja

Earlier this week I got great news: I’ve been accepted into the doctoral programme at the University of Turku. I’m incredibly happy I’m getting to do a PhD, as continuing in academia has been my goal ever since I got my MA two years ago. Now it’s going to happen for real: I get to work on Middle English, concentrating on contemporaneous evidence in the form of manuscripts. A fizz of academic creativity is building up in me as I think about all the interesting stuff I’m going to study and do!

I hope that concentrating on academia will also help me with my creative writing. Quite a lot of my poems/stories are inspired by the stuff I come across in my research: history just has so much weird and wonderful detail begging to be elaborated on or twisted into fantasy worlds. And of course, compared to a 9-to-5 job, the self-made schedules of academia will leave a lot more leeway for integrating creative writing with the rest of my life. Yay!

On the other hand, it’s going to be busy. Things always are (with me, at least). So, I’m going to have to teach myself new ways of self-discipline and how to balance academic work with my creative writing. Both are important to me, but I don’t want to become overwhelmed.

Brandi Schillace wrote a really inspiring post related to this topic over at Magical Words. I read this post back in April when it was published, but it’s even more useful now that I know I’ll actually be doing this PhD thing. Brandi has some sound advice for overachievers regardless of whether you’re working in academia or not – a really good read. Being “good enough” is so hard for people like me who tend towards perfectionism, but it’s essential to learn (and re-learn).

This is something I especially want to keep in mind (from the blog post):

Balancing academic, work, and writing life isn’t about roguish daring and a willingness to burn the candle at both ends. It requires re-seeing, a new vision of what balance means.

Starting this autumn, I’ll have to find out what that balance is for me.

(Kinda) Sunday recs

Published on by Sara Norja

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

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

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.

Sunday recs: Two poems, two stories

Published on by Sara Norja

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!

Sunday recs: inkscrawl

Published on by Sara Norja

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.

Sunday recs: A bunch of lovely poetry from Goblin Fruit

Published on by Sara Norja

I had so many poems from Goblin Fruit marked as “rec this” that I thought I’d put them all in the same goblintastic post. They’re from the newest issue as well as a couple of the older ones.

The Vow of Frozen Time by Alexandra Seidel, from the Winter 2014 issue. The language in this poem is simply gorgeous. The French adds a layer of magic and the attention to word-magic gives me that special kind of shiver that only poetry can accomplish.

The Right of It by Seanan McGuire (also from the Winter 2014 issue) is a great feminist reimagining of Snow White.

Learning My Way Around by Neile Graham, from the Autumn 2011 issue. A gorgeous call to adventure.

Lexicon by Kristin Gulotta, from the Spring 2013 issue. More word-magic – a delicious dictionary-poem.

Lastly, fittingly for the month, there’s April by Nita Sembrowich, also from the Spring 2013 issue. Such a breathtaking evocation of the wonder of spring – and those last lines! “treading on dragons / that time has turned to stone”… Magic.

Sunday recs: Mundanity, elephants, opera and a coffee shop

Published on by Sara Norja

This week’s Sunday Recs presents four very different stories – all of them awesome. (Well, duh, otherwise I’d hardly be recommending that you read them!)

Relentlessly Mundane by Jo Walton. This was published in Strange Horizons 14 years ago, but I only just found it while looking for, like, everything that Jo Walton has written ever. (I’ve enjoyed every novel of hers that I’ve read so far; should read the remaining ones too.) Anyway, ‘Relentlessly Mundane’ is a response to the question I’m sure a lot of us have had after reading the Narnia books: coming back home after saving the other world, how do you go back to ordinary life?

Njàbò by Claude Lalumière, in Expanded Horizons. Intriguing story with a warm strangeness to it. I’m actually not sure about the ending – it didn’t entirely work for me – but I really liked the story otherwise. The atmosphere is really unique, and there are polyamorous relationships that just exist as part of the background of the story, not as anything “edgy”. Refreshing and awesome.

The Suitcase Aria by Marissa Lingen, in Strange Horizons. The setting in this story isn’t something you see in every other specfic: it’s a weird eighteenth-century Berlin opera house. The strangeness in this nix story is nicely subtle.

Today’s final rec is Surprise Me by Andrew Knighton, in Daily Science Fiction. This story about a special sort of coffee shop is just adorable. Read it and feel all warm and fuzzy inside!

Niteblade Fundraiser 2014

Published on by Sara Norja

Niteblade is a great fantasy/horror magazine, with an awesome mix of prose and poetry in each issue. And now it’s time for the annual fundraiser.

If you want to help Niteblade continue doing its awesome thing, consider donating a few (or more) dollars at the fundraising campaign site here! In addition to feeling good about helping a magazine keep going, there are also some pretty cool perks, ranging from original art from the magazine covers to receiving a story critique.

Some things I’ve enjoyed, published in Niteblade:

Heaven & Earth, a poem (well, a duo of poems, really) by Adrienne J. Odasso.

Locket, a story by Kristi DeMeester (trigger warning: incest, abuse).

The Language of Flowers, a poem by Alicia Cole.