Amazing Stories: Interview: Amal El-Mohtar

For this fortnight on Amazing Stories I had the pleasure of interviewing the amazing Amal El-Mohtar. She is an author, poet and publisher (Goblin Fruit Poetry Journal) who just oozes beauty of expression in everything she does. Here's a snippet of the interview:

Diane Severson Mori for Amazing Stories Magazine (ASM): Tell us a little about yourself, how you came to poetry and about /writing and about the genesis of Goblin Fruit. 

Amal El-Mohtar (AE-M): When I was about seven years old or thereabouts, I was living in Beirut and reading anything with pages. I loved the italicised bits in The Hobbit, and the language in my children's version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, so I wrote a poem to the moon full of thees and thous and rhymes like "light" and "plight." My parents encouraged me, telling me about my grandfather who was a poet imprisoned and tortured for his politics, telling me that poetry (and, I guess, rebellion) ran in my blood. My father taught me about rhythm by reciting lines from Shakespeare's sonnets with full iambic emphases. I grew up taught that poetry was something to speak aloud and be proud of, and I'm very grateful for that.

Please go to Amazing Stories for the full interview!

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Poetry Planet: 2013 Rhysling Award Showcase (Part 1)

My newest edition of Poetry Planet will has come out on StarShipSofa No. 309 today! This is another contest winner's showcase and the third year running for the Rhysling Award Showcase. You'll hear 6 of the 7 poems that placed in the top three (You'll hear the 7th next week). They are:

1st place:

Short: “The Cat Star” by Terry Garey, Lady Poetesses from Hell, ed. Bag Person Press Collective (Bag Person Press)

Long: “Into Flight” by Andrew Robert Sutton from the online magazine Silver Blade 14

Terry A.Garey's poetry has been published in many journals and anthologies, including Dodeca, Uranus, Star*Line, Asimov's, Weird Tales, The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, Raw Sacks, Paper Bag Writer, Dreams and Nightmares, Women en Large, and Burning With A Vision. She has edited poetry for Janus, Tales of the Unanticipated, and is the editor (with Eleanor Arnason) of Time Gum, and also Time Frames: an anthology of speculative poetry. She lives in Minneapolis, MN with a librarian, two cats, and more books than she can count. She is a founding member of Lady Poetesses From Hell.

Andrew Robert Sutton was born and raised in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He attended Michigan State University where he studied both telecommunications and the written word. His heart has been torn between his love of cutting-edge technologies and traditional art forms ever since. His articles on the history of technology and its impact on business have appeared in over forty publications, including newspapers, magazines, and numerous blogs. "Into Flight" is his first foray into poetry.

2nd Place:

Short: “Futurity’s Shoelaces” by Marge Simon found in the Balticon 2012 Program Book. 

Long: “String Theory” by John Philip Johnson in James Gunn’s  (online journal) Ad Astra 1.

MargeSimon's works appear in publications such as Bête Noire, Niteblade, Daily SF Magazine, Silver Blade, and Dreams & Nightmares. She edits a column for the HWA Newsletter and serves as Chair of the Board of Trustees. She has won the Strange Horizons Readers Choice Award, twice the Bram Stoker Award™, the Rhysling Award and the Dwarf Stars Award. She has published several collections including Like Birds in the Rain, Unearthly Delights, The Mad Hattery, Vampires, Zombies & Wanton Souls, and Dangerous Dreams. Her poem, "The Gods, Fallen" is up at Liquid Imagination.

John Philip Johnson has had work in, or forthcoming in, Dreams & Nightmares, Mythic Delirium, Strange Horizons, Rattle, Southern Poetry Review, and Daily Science Fiction, among other places, besides James Gunn's Ad Astra where this poem first appeared. He reviews for Star*Line and elsewhere, and just recently earned a master's degree in English, with a thesis of science fictional poetry, from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. His astro-engineering work at Raytheon is still classified, but let's just say...His poem "Stairs Appear In a Hole Outside of Town" can be read (and eventually listened to - narration by yours truly - Diane) at Rattle.

3rd Place:

Short: “Sister Philomela Heard the Voices of Angels”, by Megan Arkenberg, Strange Horizons- 8/7/12 

Long (tie):  “The Time Traveler’s Weekend” by Adele Gardner  - Liquid Imagination

Long (tie): "The Necromantic Wine” by Wade German Avatars of Wizardry, edited by Charles Lovecraft (P'rea Press)

Megan Arkenberg lives and writes in California. Her work has recently appeared in Asimov's, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and The Best Horror of the Year, Volume 5, and has tried for best short story of 2012 in the Asimov's Readers' Award. Her poem "The Curator Speaks in the Department of Dead Languages" won the Rhysling Award for best long poem of 2012. Megan procrastinates by editing the fantasy e-zine Mirror Dance. She also has recent poetry publications in the September issue of Asimov's and the Fall issue of Star*Line.

Adele Gardner's poetry collection, Dreaming of Days in Astophel, is available from Sam's Dot Publishing. Her stories and poems have appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Legends of the Pendragon, The Doom of Camelot, Penumbra, Scheherazade's Façade, Strange Horizons, Mythic Delirium, Goblin Fruit, and New Myths, among others. In 2012, she chaired the Rhysling Awards for the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Currently cataloging librarian for a public library, she's also literary executor for her father, Delbert R. Gardner. 

I will provide biographical and link information for Wade German and her poem next week. Her fantastic poem "The Necromantic Wine" is epic in length and would have burst the seams of this week's StarShipSofa. And I'd like you all to be fresh when you hear it!



Appearing on StarShipSofa No. 310:

Wade German's poems have appeared internationally in numerous journals and anthologies, including Dark Horizons, Dreams and Nightmares, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Midnight Echo, Mythic Delirium, Nameless, Phantom Drift, Space and Time, Star*Line, Strange Sorcery and Weird Fiction Review. Barbarian is a recent poem appearing on Heroic Fantasy Quarterly.

"The Necromantic Wine" was inspired by George Sterling's "A Wine of Wizardry" and Clark Ashton Smith's "The Hashish-Eater," two poems which I have read again and again with a never ending fascination. Both are replete with bizarre, hallucinatory imagery and ideas sprung from the dark fantastic imagination. But for the most part, they are very different poems, with perhaps the exception that both convey a sense of voyaging into the unfamiliar, of questing for the unknown. It was that sense of voyage and quest that I was after when I wrote "The Necromantic Wine."

Amazing Stories: Review - Unexplained Fevers, by Jeannine Hall Gailey

My next article on Amazing Stories has gone up. This time it's a review of a wonderful collection of poetry by Redmond, Washington, USA's Poet Laureate Jeannine Hall Gailey entitled "Unexplained Fevers".

All of the poems in this collection are in some way or another about Fairy Tale Characters. Here's a snippet:

--> This is a collection about the “heroines” of Fairy Tale, Myth and other stories of the Collective Consciousness. I put quotes around heroines because they often aren’t in Gailey’s poetry. She makes them real people, with foibles and flaws. She takes familiar characters and gives them a back story or spins the story along after the “Happily Ever After” of the original (or Disney version!) is a popular convention among poets. I’ve reviewed two such collections here on Amazing Stories ("Out of the Black Forest" by F. J. Bergmann and "Villains and Heroes" by Mary Turzillo) and you’ll see it...For the full text please go to the post at Amazing Stories Mag. There are 5 poems from the collection to listen to which I recorded and 2 others that you can follow links too. I hope you enjoy the article and the poems.

You can also hear Jeannine read from her forth-coming collection and Unexplained Fevers on the Jack Straw Podcast.

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