I’ll be away

A quick note to say “until July!” I’m off to Odyssey and will have precious little time for silly little things like blogging and sleeping.

I’ll give a shout (pixelated) when I return.

Have a great Summer Solstice everyone! See you in July.

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Why I read and write Fantastic fiction

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artwork: Star Harvest, C.S. Lewis quote, Mieke Geenen, why art is important, why speculative fiction

“If I find within myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”

– C.S. Lewis

A Poem for Sofia

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on writing, poetry, Sofia Samatar, writing poems for others

Your prose has a texture, this wonderful quality of sepia flooded by warm light. Mine, well mine is cold and bare bones, a half-scraped white. My writing has no subtlety – everything shows in the antiseptic lighting: the rivets and seams, every dent and imperfection. How to create that atmosphere I breathe when I read your work, that wandering through breaking light so palpable I feel it brush my skin. Its sighing warms my bones. I shiver. I unfold. How to write that tone, redolent, everywhere, like a morning mist: the other world of imagination peeking through, but upon closer inspection it was just a shadow, a nodding flower, a bird taking flight. Yet, that glimmering in the shifting light leaves me wondering.

[Want to know what I mean about Sofia’s writing? Here’s Sofia’s blog; her gorgeous prose enchanted novel, A Stranger in Olondria, through Small Beer Press; recently published poem, “Undoomed“, and an interview at Ideomancer; her “Snowbound in Hamadan” in Stone Telling (which she read at the Open Secrets Poetry Reading at Wiscon37); her “Burnt Lyric” in Goblin Fruit; among many other things…]