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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Narration on PodCastle! Daughter of Botu, by Eugie Foster

We are interrupting our regularly scheduled broadcast....

Just wanted to let you know before it gets old, that one of my major narration projects has just gone live over at the main fantasy podcast magazine - Podcastle.

It's called Daughter of Botu, by Eugie Foster. Eugie Foster is an wonderful writer living in Atlanta and you may have heard any number of her stories in online podcast magazines such as EscapePod, ClonePod, PseudoPod and Drabblecast. You can read more about her and her over 100 publications at her website.

Daughter of Botu, an eastern story of whimsy, can be found in Eugie's short story collection, "Returning My Sister's Face: And other Eastern Stories of Whimsy and Malice" (follow the link to Amazon.com). It also received honorable mention in "The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection", edited by Gardner Dozois. It's the story of a young "rabbit", a Daughter of Botu, who meets, falls in love with and marries a local prince. At court, in human form, her life changes drastically, and not necessarily for the good.

I really enjoyed narrating this story. It has a fairy tale quality with delightful, distinct characters.

Enjoy!