Five smart people talk about writing

I've just listened to a podcast made at IFCA, in which Eileen Gunn, Cecilia Holland, Paul Park, and Theodora Goss, moderated by Karen Burnham, discuss writing workshops as well as the pedagogy of writing generally. Their conversation includes fascinating insights about the writing process. I especially love their insistence in blurring the lines between writing critical essays and writing fiction. You can listen to it here. 

Oh, and there's a bonus: Eileen reveals what Bill Gibson told her was the "secret of writing."

Interlude, with Icicles

Here in Seattle, big chunks of snow mixed among the usual, more delicate snowflakes are falling from the sky. Forecasters have been promising "melting rain," but apparently the weather has become as unpredictable as any other event. Tramping out to the nearest cafe, trudging through snow yellowed by dog piss, I specially looked for street drains and saw that not all of them were free of snow and ice. Back in 1996, two feet of snow melted under the force of torrential rains, and the water had nowhere to drain. (I distinctly recall the weirdness of watching Tarkovsky's Stalker, which we kept pausing for Tom to make trips to the basement to bail the rising water. The rain, in Stalker, is relentless.) The coming rain is expected to be gentle, so the comparison may be amiss. Who knows? In the meantime, we're dodging long, melting icicles dropping without notice on hapless passersby. They're pretty things, those sleek and shiny daggers, and when I was a kid, I thought they tasted better than ice cream and every winter would try, unsuccessfully, to get my parents to let me store some in the freezer for later consumption.



Yesterday Strange Horizon posted a review of Theodora Goss's Voices from Fairyland: The Fantastical Poems of Mary Coleridge, Charlotte Mew, and Sylvia Townsend Warner. The reviewer, Karen J. Weyant, begins:

For many of us, mention of the Victorian Age of literature conjures images of Norton Anthologies used in college literature class or the thick works of Charles Dickens—images of a time that celebrated the novel and pushed poetry to the background. Certainly, anthologies devoted solely to poets born in the Victorian Era are rare. Even rarer is a thorough explanation of speculative poetry, which is what makes Voices From Fairyland: The Fantastical Poems of Mary Coleridge, Charlotte Mew, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, edited by Theodora Goss, so fascinating.

You can read the whole review here.

Voices From Fairyland: The Fantastical Poems of Mary Coleridge, Charlotte Mew, and Sylvia Townsend Warner

I'm pleased to announce the publication of Voices From Fairyland: The Fantastical Poems of Mary Coleridge, Charlotte Mew, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, edited and with poems by Theodora Goss. This is Number 20 in Aqueduct's Conversation Pieces Series.

The volume, which is 148 pages, includes four original essays--
Introduction," "Through the Gates of Ivory and Horn: The Fantastical Poems of Mary Coleridge"; "Into the Wet, Wild Wood: The Fantastical Poems of Charlotte Mew"; "A Birdsong Wilderness: The Fantastical Poems of Sylvia Townsend Warner"-- 12 poems each by Coleridge and Warner; 8 poems by Mew; and 18 poems by Goss, 10 of them original to the volume.

In the Introduction, Goss writes:

In this book I chose to focus on poems by Mary Coleridge, Charlotte Mew, and Sylvia Townsend Warner because of all the poets I could have included, they were the ones whom I thought had been the most unjustly neglected--the most talented among those whose talent had gone largely unrecognized. They were also the ones whom I most loved, but I think that unjust neglect was a part of my love for them. I felt protective toward them, and also fierce in promoting their work. I did not have to worry about arguing for Christina Rossetti's relevance; she is, as I have mentioned, taught everywhere. But I felt that I had to argue for Warner because, although attention has been paid to her prose, almost nothing has been written about her poetry. While I was working on this anthology, a friend asked me why I was working on it rather than on a story, or even a novel. I said, "If I don't do it, who will?" It felt like an obligation toward three women writers who had influenced me deeply.

But Coleridge, Mew, and Warner are only three examples of what I consider a broader phenomenon, the rest of the ice that must be present, underwater, when we see icebergs floating on a northern sea. That underwater ice is the tradition of women writing fantastical poetry.

Voices from Fairyland is available now through Aqueduct's website and will be available at WisCon; it will likely be available through other venues in a few weeks or so.

The Aqueduct Gazette, Issue 3

The latest issue of The Aqueduct Gazette is now available from download at Aqueduct's site, here. Contents of the issue include:

* "Seeing Voices: A Conversation with Nisi Shawl" by Jesse Vernon
* "The Fantastical Poems of Mary Coleridge" by Theodora Goss
* "Feminist Science Fiction and WisCon: A Poly-Political Conversation with Eileen Gunn" by Jesse Vernon
* "Hanging Out Along the Aqueduct..." (a guest editorial) by Ray Vanck

Plus, of course, peeks at Aqueduct books to come!

Voices from Fairyland by Theodora Goss

I've been sick for the last several days: hence my silence. But now I've got some exciting news.

I'm pleased to announce that this spring Aqueduct will be publishing Voices from Fairyland: The Fantastical Poems of Mary Coleridge, Charlotte Mew, and Sylvia Townsend Warner by Theodora Goss as a volume in the Conversation Pieces series. We'll be launching this volume at WisCon in May.

The volume will include fantastical poems by Coleridge, Mew, and Warner, accompanied by four fascinating essays and several poems by Dora Goss in conversation with the Coleridge, Mew, and Warner's poems. To give you just a little taste of Voices from Fairyland, here are a few paragraphs from Dora's Introduction:

Coleridge, Mew, and Warner are only three examples of what I consider a broader phenomenon, the rest of the ice that must be present, underwater, when we see icebergs floating on a northern sea. That underwater ice is the tradition of women writing fantastical poetry. I will show you what I mean by focusing on one theme. Over and over again, women have written about witches. In "Witch-Wife," Edna St. Vincent Millay describes a woman whose "voice is a string of coloured beads, / Or steps leading into the sea" who "was not made for any man," not even the narrator, to whom she is married. The witch in Anne Sexton's "Her Kind" is fiercer and stronger. She tells us,

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.

She creates a domestic space for herself in a place that is decidedly undomestic, that is wild, feeding worms and elves rather than the children that the women who are not witches presumably feed. "A woman like that is misunderstood," Sexton tell us, and we can certainly understand why, if her voice is a string of colored beads or those mysterious steps. She must speak differently, in a language that we cannot quite understand. And here is Emily Dickinson:

Witchcraft was hung, in History,
But History and I
Find all the Witchcraft that we need
Around us, every Day—

Whatever you do, she implies, you cannot eradicate witchcraft. It is part of the world around us, always present. And we—History and Emily Dickinson—need witchcraft. I wonder what they need it for exactly, but Emily Dickinson, always her enigmatic self, does not tell us.