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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Concert: O Maria Virgo - Kantika

I'm afraid I can't remember if I mentioned it here or not: I joined a Parisian vocal ensemble for medieval music - Kantika, directed by my friend and colleague, Kristin Hoefener. We gave a concert in Speyer on Friday night. It was part of the concert series "Via Mediaeval - Music and Spaces of the Middle Ages", which in turn is run by Stefan Morent, with whom I worked extensively about 7 or 8 years ago.

Part of the Speyer Cathedral crypt

Our program in honor of the Virgin Mary included music in 2 or 3 parts from the Codex Las Huelgas, one of the most important manuscripts of Spanish sacred music, and Gregorian Chant done in the Spanish style. It was arranged as a Mass might have been sung around the 1300. As encores 2 of our singers, Carlotta Buiatti and Sandra Bessis, who are both well-versed in arabic singing styles sang a Sephardic Lullaby and then we sang a 3 part piece by John Dunstable, which is from the new program we're preparing.

The crypt

Where we sang most of the concert

We sang in the crypt of the Speyerer Dom (Cathedral), which is enormous and the acoustics are lovely for medieval music. The reverb disappeared a bit when the crypt was filled with people but was still quite wonderful. We used the space a bit, processing in with the first piece, doing an antiphonal Gloria from opposite sides of the crypt and Marianne and I sang the Alleluia from the back.

SWR Radio recorded the program but we don't know when they'll air it. I'll post it when it goes on the air.

A nice little bonus doing this concert was seeing Stefan Morent again (he attended the concert). Unfortunately, he is no longer doing women's ensemble stuff, but sticking to men's ensembles so that he can sing along. It was also nice seeing another of the presenters (whose name I regret not having asked after, since I've long since forgotten it and now I can't find it online), who took care of Elysium when we sang in the same festival when it was called "Vokalmusik entlang der Romanischen Strasse" ("Vocal music along the Romanesque Road"). Also, Christoph Prégardien, Tenor, sang a song in the Cathedral Thursday night and stayed at the same hotel as Kantika. We saw him at breakfast on Friday and had a nice conversation. I attended a course he gave on German Lieder way back when (1996?) in Georgsmarienhütte, Germany during the "Tage Alter Musik"(Osnabrück). He pretended to remember me. Very sweet.

Amazing Stories: Poetry Round-up September 2013

I thought I'd try something new with this week's Amazing Stories blog post about Science Fiction Poetry. I found many good poems inn a quick search of the web and a couple of things I've come across through-out September and compiled them into one article for your reading pleasure.

Here's a snippet:

Strange Horizons has a long history of publishing good speculative poetry. A few poems from this weekly online magazine make it onto the Rhysling Award ballot each year. This week gifts us with a beautiful poem by Mari Ness (whose poetry has appeared on my podcast Poetry Planet): “The Loss”.

To read the full article go here!

Enjoy!

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Concert: Mozart "Credo Mass" and CPE Bach "Magnificat"

On Sunday, 22 September 2013, I sang in Dillenburg, Germany at the Catholic Church. I sing there a lot, on average once or twice a year. This time it was CPE Bach and Mozart on the program.

The Mozart is a lesser known piece but quite wonderful. The solo-quartet has bits woven throughout the mostly choral setting of the traditional ordinary mass parts. There are no arias or long completely solo lines, but the effect is gorgeous. We soloists stood among the choir (in a row together in the front however) and so our voices just emerged from the choir.

I've longed to sing the "Magnificat" by C.P.E. Bach for many years. It's a spectacular piece. Quite brutal, um, I mean high for the choir and the soloists. The choir, the Bezirkskantorei Dillenburg, was in fine form, as were the other soloists: Sybille Kamphues (Alto), Hans-Jörg Mammel (Tenor) and Wolfgang Weiss (Bass). I on the other hand was a little compromised, such that it was a bit of a struggle to get through the concert. But I hope it wasn't too noticeable... I have an appointment with a specialist next Monday, hopefully it won't be anything too difficult to fix. :-(

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Amazing Stories - More Awards! The Rhysling Award

So, did I say it was awards season? But with WorldCon in San Antonio, TX just past you'd know that. That is, if you are interested in Science Fiction in any manner. But if you aren't you probably aren't reading this! Let me know in the comments if you get to the end, despite having no love for Science Fiction! :-)

The Rhysling Award for 2013 was officially announced at WorldCon and I've posted an announcement of my own and a discussion of the two winning poems at Amazing Stories Magazine.

Here's a snippet:

...

However, the main thrust of this post is about the Rhysling Award, the Science Fiction Poetry Association's award for poetry in two length categories: short (under 40 lines) and long (40 lines and over). As per the rules only SFPA members are entitled to vote, so it's more like a Nebula Award than a popular award, but if you are interested in helping choose the best SF Poetry becoming a member is very easy and quite inexpensive, especially if you are willing to read the association's journal Star*Line as a PDF instead of in print. I urge you to check it out.

This year's winners were gleaned from a selection of 110 poems (70 short and 40 long). which could be found in 57 different print, online and audio publications. Kudos go to Star*Line, Goblin Fruit and Stone Telling with 11, 9 and 7 poems nominated respectively.

I will be producing an edition of Poetry Planet for StarShipSofa showcasing the Rhysling Award winning and placing poems, much like I've done in the past 2 years. I hope you'll listen! It's always a wonderful way to get fresh insight and deepen your understanding of a poem. But I'm not biased at all.

Terry A. Garey's winning short poem, "The Cat Star", published in the anthology Lady Poetesses from Hell (Bag Person Press) won by ....

Go to Amazing Stories for the whole article! Enjoy!

And if you don't normally read Science Fiction I'd like to encourage you to read this blog post by Nina Munteanu about "When Science Fiction IS Science Fiction". She does a great job of illustrating what it is about SF that I love and what motivates me to read it. Let me know what you think!

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