Guest Blog 16
Changing Locations, Changing Perspective
by Linda Gould
I love ghost stories. I grew up on the east coast of the US and spent my summers ensconced in a dark corner of the town library reading about ghosts and the supernatural from an old tome that was nearly as big as I was. In my teen years, I visited the haunted places of Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York, checking for cold areas and hoping to see ghosts. I never did, but that didn’t stop my lifetime of interest in the supernatural.
Kasa-bake (public domain)
When I was 23, I moved to Europe where ghosts and legends are as much part of the culture as beer and bread. So, it was no surprise that the first stories I wrote were about ancient castles and haunted manors, or that my ghosts were always vengeful because ghosts exist from some form of trauma, right? The unjust imprisonment and death of a nobleman’s rival, a woman lover murdered when she became pregnant, a suicide after a betrayal…the presence of ghosts signaled a violent event, and the stories I wrote at that time reflected all the tropes of the genre.
Dungeon in a Swiss castle Photo by Linda Gould
Then I moved to Japan, a Buddhist and Shinto nation that has an association with death and spirits that is vastly different than in western, Christian countries. A few years ago, I realized that those differences have influenced my writing.
To understand how, it is important to understand the Japanese belief system. To start with, the Shinto religion believes everything—animate and inanimate—has a kami, what English speakers would call a spirit. It’s why mountains like Fuji are worshipped and trees, rocks, and bodies of water, for example, are considered sacred. It is the foundation for Japan’s plethora of yokai—like Tengu and kappa—and tsukumogami such as kasa-obake (the famous one-eyed, one-legged umbrella). Everyday life, therefore, is filled with the mysterious, and the knowledge of those kami presences influences individual life.
Concerning my ghost stories, one of the most fundamental differences is that the Japanese have a relationship with the dead and a responsibility to them that has no equivalent in the west. From the family members washing and dressing the deceased, burning incense to protect the vulnerable soul from evil, and placing the bones in the urn for burial, this intimacy, coupled with the Buddhist belief in reincarnation, transforms the philosophy of death into a loving relationship rather than a fearful experience. That relationship continues indefinitely. Japanese homes have family altars (butsudan) where the family’s ancestral spirits reside. The living talk to their ancestors daily and expect protection from them. At specific times of the year, people visit their family gravesite to clean, burn incense, and say prayers that keep their ancestors happy and healthy in the afterworld.
There is even a holiday when the Japanese invite their ancestral spirits into their homes: Obon, one of the country's two biggest holidays. Special food is served for the visiting spirits, and communities hold dances and festivals in their honor.
It comes as no surprise, therefore, that my ghost stories would reflect details of Japanese culture, from the obvious, like language, food, and history, to the more nebulous, such as the morality and principles of Buddhism and Shintoism. What did surprise me, though, is how deeply and unconsciously living in Japan changed my writing style. I don’t plot out my stories in advance. I open my mind to whatever lies in wait and give release to the words and stories that demand to be told.
In Japan, I live in the world of women (yes, the two genders have distinct and roles in society). My most recent stories are slower-paced and subtler than anything I’ve written before. My female characters are gentle and indirect, intimating hidden strengths and revealing their independence in ways that are almost uncomfortable for my American self. I struggle to find authenticity with my male Japanese characters and must ask my Japanese friends pointed questions to learn about male behaviour (I hope they never discover that my curiosity has a hidden goal!). However, elements of my own upbringing blend with those of my adopted home in ways that I would struggle with if I tried to consciously include them in my writing.
For example, I recently finished a short story called “It’s Your Turn” in which foreign spirits use the Japanese Obon holiday to confront a living person. The story develops slowly, like the rising mist of burning incense, because wisps of smoke play a crucial role. Only because I’m immersed in Japanese culture and steeped in their traditions could my muse deliver a story with the right balance of subtlety and action, Japanese and American perspectives.
Increasingly, the main characters of my stories are ghosts. This is in direct contrast to my earlier work and to ghost stories, in general, where the ghost serves as a foil to the main human character. My most recent stories have evolved from a few principal human characters encountering ghosts in haunted places to environments where complex ghosts exist to tell their own stories, complete with tension, conflict, and characterization. The Japanese culture of multiple gods, spirits, and reincarnation provides me with far more opportunities for storytelling, so my ghosts’ living and dead experiences are deeply intertwined. Their conflicts, interactions with the gods or spirits they meet, and the choices they make have more consequences when held up to their future reincarnation. There is a texture to my ghost stories now that is only possible because of where I live and the culture I live in.
Sacred waterfall in Japan. Photo by Linda Gould
So, you don’t write about ghosts and you don’t live abroad. How can my experiences have any value for you and your writing? Not everyone can pick up and move to another location to be inspired. But everyone’s writing can be improved by being curious about people, cultures, and environments different than their own. If you live in the city, take a drive to the countryside and stop at that roadside diner. Watch the interactions among people, make note of what strikes you as interesting, listen to conversations, accents and speech patterns. At the coffee shop, stop working or reading and take time to observe the flow of people, what they wear, how they walk, their quirks. If you are writing about an elderly/teenage/disabled/colored person, etc., talk to someone in that classification, tell them about a scene in your story and ask what they would do. Every place you visit, every person you meet, and every interaction you have can be fodder for your writing if you take a moment to observe, with awareness, the little details—the smells, sounds, background noise, feel of things. Make note of them. Read those notes occasionally to let the ideas simmer in your brain, and definitely refer to them when writing. You’ll be surprised at how easily your observations texturize your work to make it come alive. Even if, like me, you write about the dead.
Author’s Bio: Linda Gould is an American writer living in Japan. She is a member of the Horror Writers Association and is the editor of White Enso, a publication of art inspired by Japan, and host of the weekly Kaidankai podcast that reads ghost and supernatural stories. Her fiction and non-fiction writing has appeared in publications in the US, Japan, and online.
Twitter: @GhostJapanese or @WhiteEnso
Websites: https://www.whiteenso.com/ &
Guest Blog 15
A Book Award Judge Tells the Inside Story about Contests, Awards, and Shiny Gold Stickers
By Sandra Wendel
Do book awards sell books?
I’ll tell you right up front: nobody knows. But stick with me because shiny gold stickers can’t hurt, and winning an award gives you a novel marketing hook, bragging rights, and a touch of professional recognition.
I admit, I am a judge for national book awards. I’ve been asked to preserve confidentiality of the process, so I can’t name names.
I’ve also been on the other side, hoping my books will be recognized for their merit, and, yes, my books have won awards, but I’ve also not been mentioned in a sea of hopefuls for plenty of other contests.
Right now, I have a stack of business books on my desk awaiting my review for a prestigious award. Believe me, we judges feel the pressure to examine and evaluate and be fair. As a book author and editor myself, I know the work, the agony, angst, and anticipation that the author has put into Every. Single. Book. On. Every. Single. Page. As a judge, I want to honor your work, whether you “win” or not.
How to find book awards
You can perform a Google search to find “book awards” or “book awards for independently published books” and read the requirements (some might be a copyright date within the last year; fiction only; independently published only; join the organization to be considered). If you are traditionally published, this task is often done by your publisher (maybe they need a nudge).
You can also check out awards programs in this post from the Book Designer or this from BookBub. Many competitions allow you to choose from a huge list of categories in both fiction and nonfiction, even cover design. Fees range from free to several hundred bucks.
You never know if your book competed against hundreds or thousands of entries. You won’t find out who the judges were (possibilities are book agents and publishers, editors like myself and writers or somebody’s aunt who loves romance novels). I made that last one up. I just don’t know.
I can’t speak for other judges, but I do know that I feel honored to judge a book by its cover and everything else, and I take my role seriously. I know how much work you put into your book.
Costs versus rewards
Now, would I give up the designations my coauthor, a physician at Mayo Clinic, and I have won as a Foreword Book of the Year INDIEFAB winner or Benjamin Franklin Silver from the Independent Book Publishers Association for How Not to Be My Patient? No.
But the reality is that any award program that doesn’t have Nobel, Pulitzer, Caldecott, Edgar, or Booker in the name is less prestigious. That’s just a fact. However, readers generally don’t know the difference.
Entering has its costs (and some rewards). For many awards, you send a copy or three of your paperback and a check for anywhere from $40 to hundreds.
Are the organizations sponsoring the awards making money on the entry fees? You bet. Do the organizations pay judges? Generally no.
Beware of the award that sounds like a pay-for-play scheme and is simply a money-making endeavor for a little-known organization.
But wait, there’s more. Some awards will offer you stickers, banners, a press release, and other swag to promote your honor (and their award to enhance their bank account). A free .jpg of the award may be all you need to revise your cover and book’s website. And be sure to add the mention on your Amazon description page.
What do judges look for?
As a judge, I am sent a copy of the book and asked to comment on the content, the quality of the writing, the cover design and title, the overall look in regard to the genre, the absence or presence of numerous typos, content, the author’s voice, the interior design.
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Judges look for compliance with general book industry standards. So a DIY cover that looks Photoshopped will get lost in the shuffle and not be taken seriously. A rambling narrative in a memoir that doesn’t hang together without a chapter structure wouldn’t become a finalist. A novel with plotline holes and poorly developed characters wouldn’t get a second notice.
Your book is a package you are presenting to a reader to be opened and enjoyed. Judges are looking for the complete package: look, feel, professionalism, writing, story line.
In general the obvious areas of review are these:
Is the cover design appropriate for the genre and does the look convey what the book is about?
Is the genre clear from the cover and title together?
Is the book professionally designed inside too?
Is the book professionally edited (typos on every page mean your book goes to the bottom of the ranking)?
Is the story easy to follow? Is the writing free from errors and typos? Has the author created a logical flow with chapters? Is the author’s voice appropriate to the genre? Has the author done the homework on any research and appropriately documented sources? Is the memoir heartfelt and compelling? Is the fictional story thrilling and sparkling?
First impressions are everything
When I open a box of wanna-be winners’ books, I can clearly see those that have been professionally designed both inside and out. The pages are easy to read in a serif font. The covers are striking. Photos all have detailed captions. The back cover copy is enticing. I do what potential book buyers in a bookstore do: they look at the cover, turn to the back cover, and then open and riffle through the pages.
Then we judges start at the beginning with the contents page, the introduction, the first chapters. You have about fifty pages to grab a reader.
Am I grabbed? Even on a topic I’m not particularly interested in? Yes or no.
The books I send up for awards with my highest recommendations are fascinating. When I find myself lost in the words and not judging the numerous typos or lack of style or poor organization, gratuitous use of color, when I can’t put the book down, I know I’ve got something that needs to be honored.
I can even overlook production issues such as tight gutters and a funky font if the topic is so well written, I lose track of time. Those are rare.
Does the writing flow? Is there enough paragraphing or do I see big gray walls of text? All these conventions of layout and design complement the author’s words to make the readers’ experience enjoyable.
A word of caution: If you are asked to send three copies of your paperback to a contest/award, I would bet only two judges are given your book to review. You have to wow two people who may not like your memoir of growing up in Nazi Germany, or one may love it and the other hate it. Your tales of hunting in the wilderness may end up with a judge who hates guns and killing animals. Your humorous book about marriage may be sent to a judge who is recently divorced.
See how sometimes the judging becomes the luck of the draw?
As a judge, I force myself to read through (or skim read) books on topics I don’t know about or would never choose to read for myself. In nonfiction genres, I’ve judged books on hunting and abuse and computer technology and craft beers and gamification and schizophrenia and circus performers and tried to determine if the books have the qualities to be an award winner. It’s tough. Apples cannot be compared even to other apples.
When rankings are tallied, you have to be on the top of two or three judges’ lists.
Some award programs provide feedback from the judges. Others do not. You may get a paragraph blurb you can use in marketing, or not. If you aren’t a winner, you may get just a “sorry you didn’t win” email.
I’m particularly frustrated when I see the list of award winners and my books are not among the finalists or winners. (Being a finalist is prestigious, too, so don’t discount it.) Don’t be discouraged.
Your best bet: Keep writing good books.
Sandra Wendel is a nonfiction book editor and book award judge for two major industry organizations. Her book, Cover to Cover: What First-Time Authors Need to Know about Editing, has already won three industry awards, and she has her fingers crossed for three more to be awarded in 2022.
Guest Blog 14
Steven Dunham discusses the power of the individual.
A Small Difference
By Steve Dunham
What difference can I make? I’m only one person. Especially as a writer, I sometimes feel that I’ve had little effect.
Some things I’ve written—things I intended for publication—have been read by only a few people. Did I do any good?
Other things I’ve written have been published in newspapers and in online publications, and I trust that they influenced some people positively, helped some people, or entertained some people. Often, though, writers and publishers place their work before the public and get little response. We don’t know what effect, if any, our writing is having.
Sometimes, though, things are happening outside my view. For example, a few years went by in which I got no royalties for my book The Editor’s Companion. I thought it might have gone out of print. Then, suddenly, in 2021, I got a check for three years’ worth of royalties (not enough to live on, not even for three weeks, in case you’re wondering). So people were still buying it and, I hope, reading it.
Sometimes the driver of a bus I rode to work would tell stories to the passengers. Once she told us about being impatient when a police officer made her bus wait while he let other traffic go.
Then she said to herself, “He can see things I can’t,” and she decided to be patient and trust the officer.
There are always things going on that I can’t see. As a writer, therefore, I hope that my writing does some good whether I can see it or not, whether it’s paying work or something I do just because I have something to say.
Making a small difference is worth it, I think. It applies, for example, to recycling. For years I scrupulously separated glass, plastic, and metal from my trash and put it into the recycling dumpster. Then one day I saw the garbage crew come and dump the trash dumpster and the recycling dumpster into the garbage truck. It all went to the same place!
I found out where the closest recycling center was and began taking the recyclable materials there. Is it worth the effort? “Even though my influence may be limited, it is not irrelevant,” wrote Father Neil Pezzulo on that same subject—individual efforts to protect the environment—in “The Culture of Care” in Glenmary Challenge magazine, summer 2016. I agree: even if my contribution is small, it is not irrelevant.
Some of my other efforts have benefited only one other person, or only a few. For four years I was a volunteer hospital chaplain, providing prayer, a listening ear, silent presence, or (more than once) cups for the water cooler.
Usually I interacted with just one person at a time—a patient, a family member, or a staff member—and rarely with more than just a few people, typically a patient and a few family members or friends. Sometimes my help was small, but it may have mattered a lot to one person.
Have you ever faced a problem and had people tell you that you would be fine? More than 25 years ago, I lost a job, and one thing I heard was “God has something better for you.” A few years ago, at another job, I could see layoffs coming at work, and indeed hundreds of us got laid off. Before we lost our jobs, I sent my résumé to a friend, who said he would circulate it at work but couldn’t promise any results. I told him that I knew he couldn’t promise results and that I would rather have one person trying to help than a hundred people assuring me that I would be fine.
Even if my efforts make only a small difference, they aren’t irrelevant, so usually I aim to be one person trying to help.
Steve Dunham is author of The Editor’s Companion book and blog
His website is Steve Dunham’s Trains of Thought (he likes trains but writes about other things too)
Guest Blog 13
The article enumerates Pravat’s soulful transcendental love poetry impregnated with a romantic imagination, humanistic fervor, spiritual and metaphysical dimensions.
Love Sublime: The Reviewers’ Delight
By Pravat Kumar Padhy
In my early school career, I felt endowed with the beauty of nature and used to write articles pertaining to the scenic landscape.
I began composing proverbial poems (sort of monostich) in my early teens (around thirteen or fourteen) while writing essays in my mother tongue, Odia.
In the volume, edited by Atma Ram on, “Interviews with Indian Writing in English”, 1992, I candidly expressed, Poems come to my mind as a fragrance to flower. Anything I see, it creates a symbolic frame in my mind......... when I see a small grain of seed, I feel it is tiny / because it nests with care / the mightiest in it.”
The beauty of nature, socio-economic spectrum, human values, social solidarity and occasionally mystics with sublime metaphysical expression predominantly occupy in my writings.
In the early stage of my literary career, I wrote a few poems on love and romance in Odia.
…On this earth
We are two lines
You are latitude
And
I am longitude
-Excerpt from Sate Tame (Indeed You), Early 1970s
If sweet eyes are the twinkling stars
I am always there my darling moon
If kisses are the morning brown clouds
How far are you from me?
Less than the distance of your sacred lips.
(A poem written in English in the Early 1970s)
My first printed short English poems, Defining and Love, appeared in the “THE SCOLOMANIAC”, No.3, Feb 1979, a journal of Indian Institute of Technology (ISM), Dhanbad. My Professor Dr. Sudhir Basumallick regaled reading the verse and felt happy about the writing by a science student.
LOVE
Love is the legend of life.
It has no shape, size of its own
It is as pure as milk
And is as soft as the Himalayan snow.
Between you and me
It is an open ocean for all to swim.
-THE SCOLOMANIAC, No.3, Feb 1979
Later in 1984, I had composed a poem, Konark Visit, which was published in Youth Age, November 1984, embedding romantic touch with geological allusion:
KONARK VISIT
You plucked
My love of life
And cloaked
In your closed eye-lid.
When I rushed to you
You feigned
As a statue
Made up of khandalite.
-Youth Age, 15 th November 1984
A few love poems appeared in the literary magazine, “Poesie”, edited by S N Tripathy, in 1988, 1989 and later in 1991. With a little hesitation, I submitted a sequence of love poems, written on a piece of paper, to the editor, Dr I H Rizvi. In 1990 Dr Rizvi featured my poem, Songs of Love, entwined with an immaculate romantic imagination, in the prestigious anthology “Contemporary Indian English Love Poetry”.
The poem attracted critical attention in the literary circle. Prof. R K Singh wrote me a letter of appreciation attaching the xerox copy of the published poems.
I was overwhelmed by the remark of Prof. D.Ganasekaran who writes, “P.K.Padhy unveils the curtain of your dream followed by the silence you surrender on seabed near the shore under the roaring tide. Padhy is highly sensuous & his ‘songs of love’ is a modern ‘Endymion’.”
The manuscript of, “Songs of Love”, primarily written during the late eighties and early nineties, was preserved in my personal folder and later, almost after two decades, I submitted the manuscript to Writers Workshop, Kolkata. Prof Ananda Lal, son of iconic poet late P Lal, emailed with a note of gratification: Padhy’s poems have a thematic sensitivity and an eye and ear for imagery …….,and he later published the collection, “Songs of Love: A Celebration”, under the prestigious banner of ‘Writers Workshop’ in 2012.
The collection is an expression of self-evaluation and a sort of autobiographical expression with sublime philosophical values. I feel my poetry embodies a flow of mystical feeling, the freshness of romanticism and the aesthetic beauty of creation. The collection endures the journey of a man and his peaceful family life culminating with an optimistic flavour of philosophical attainment. Editor, Beatrice van de Vis comments, “P K Padhy’s Songs of Love is an epic celebration of love and life, leading the reader on a lyrical and memorable journey through the cycles of life.
PCK Prem in ‘The Contemporary History of Indian English Poetry’, 2019 adds, “Songs of Love- A Celebration is a fine little book of lyrics where the poet enjoys the gift of life, love and sentiments sublime and creates an aura of infinite joy.”
Indeed it has been an emotional reminiscence of the journey of life. The volume has been widely reviewed. I wish to share excerpts of the review articles:
Prof. Bam Dev Sharma , Formerly Department Head, English, President, Campus of International Languages, Tribhuvan University, Nepal in his review in The Literary Herald, Vol.1 Issue 2, 2015 enumerates:
I read his, "Songs of Love: A Celebration", in which he enjoys singing the beauty of nature-- human beings. To some extent, I find some poetic complicity between William Blake's, "Songs of Innocence", and, "Songs of Experience". When we try to delve into Blake's poems, we find nothing but the inner beauty because he invokes the true beauty which is far richer than human rationality. As we know that the songs of human beings are self expression of beauty articulated in the true sense of life, Padhy makes the same because his “Songs of Love" reflect deep human psyche, humanistic fervor, the universal paradigm and the thread that connects something innate and external realities.
Artfully I repose
On the high seas
Of your beauty.
The warmth
Of my inner sun
Swims with your
Passionate waves.
Because of this idiosyncratic nature, his poems remain as fresh as blowing wind, as genuine as the panorama, as shocking as lightening. In each poem, it is hard time for the reader to sift the words from their poetic fecundity. Like the good painter, he balances the paint stroke and colors: his paint strokes are the words, and his colors are the images…… Like metaphysical poets, he combines seen and unseen, palpable with impalpable, matter with spirit, sound with words.
Slowly you sail
With shades of shyness,
And carefully I unveil
The miracle of union.
Nearing the Moon
I immerse
Within the divinely wish
When you clad me
In the world
Of celestial sky.
To be precise, Padhy's love is transcendental. It is the spirit of humanity. It tries to create bond, fidelity, truism. We never find his love dissolving into the poetic lines alone, but it creates some kind of rejuvenation with awakened consciousness.
I go back to the
Pages of time
And read the poetry again.
I plunge to think how
Time shapes our mind
With beauty and bliss.
It is more to
A divine journey indeed.
Long time ago, John Keats sings the beauty, Padhy, too, sings love as beauty which is hidden magnum of human life. His love is not fragmentary, but complete unison where human flaw and precision are put together. Besides, most of his poems are ironic, they are some flowers put into a glass gleaming from the distance. They are exquisite to expose human mystic flashes; they portray the myriad of dimensions of life.
Please convey
Our best wishes
To the New soul:
The Designer’s gift.
I wish, close to you,
She listens
The lyrics
Of the evolutionary waves.
Ramesh Anand, Poet, in his review in Boloji.com , Feb 2013 expresses:
Soulful songs of love expressed in vivid pictures with great control of imagination, passes blissfulness and create extreme love in the reader’s heart . . . songs of loves threads high quality love through the cycles of life. Each verse is beautifully woven with inseparable combination of nature and inner feelings….
Throughout night
Your smile gathers
The petals
Of the blooming buds.
I discover
Every morning
Your freshness
Becomes the garden
Of my life.
Another wonderful love poem that depicts the love beamed by children:
The kids express
The meaning of affection
And Craftsman’s bliss.
Love sublimates
The musical voice
In their innocent smiles.
He chooses to write the epilogue of life with a touch of sublime philosophy blended with divine feeling.
We walk down
The garden of life
Reminiscing
The poetic sublime.
Wind whispers
All the songs
Of our poetic flight.
Our journey
Is an extension
Of the boundless voyage.
Renowned poet and author Bhaskaranand Jha Bhaskar in Asian Signature, Issue 3, Vol 3 January 2016 interprets the romantic imagination sketched in the collection:
The poet derives pleasure in the celebration of life, even though faced with myriads of challenges. In the very first poem ‘Songs of Love- A Celebration”, he himself introduces it:
Wings of aspiration
Muse the music of shyness
Collecting vibrations of
Meandering rhymes.
Our amazed maiden meet
Manuscripts sonnets of
Different verse
Back in our mind.
The poet is emotionally so matured, romantically pure and metaphysically insightful that he paints love with rainbow of his feelings ennobled by trajectory of experiences and truthful realization. He describes love in newer light and drapes his thoughts of love with the emotional refinement.
Our love is a ceaseless
Melodious celebration,
Our love is the lamp
And we are its brightness,
Our love is a song
And we are its rhythm..
Exploration of sensuous realm of life through the purgatory process of love or love making is quite palpable in his poems of love. He lets us peep into the secret chamber where love culminates into an inexplicable unification of soul on the ecstatic bed of life. He reveals-
I sink myself
Below your neckline
And inner self silently.
You surrender
At sea-bed near the shore
Under the roaring tides.
Passionately we search
Each other closing our eyes.
His thoughts on love, romance, longing and yearning shift from physical plains to metaphysical zenith. ‘I’ and ‘you’ become ‘We’ through the sincere journey. The gradual evolution of self and soul provides a spiritual and metaphysical dimension to his poetry.
The warmth rejoice
Of the sacred celebration
Carries
The nostalgic memories
And reaches out to the sun
Of a new bright light.
In the open
Ecstasy quaintness sky,
On the cosmic path,
We continue to walk
With the evolutionary smile.
Togetherness in life, facilitated by love helps the people to tide over all the troubles of life. Love sprouts hope and with this weapon they succeed in beautifying their life.
Life is a wave
Of joy and sorrow.
Harmonically it swings
In the high and low.
I collect the grains of hope
By the side
Of the completeness
And wish
The waves of our creation
Would breathe the zest of life
For the longest time.
Love is eternal and beyond the clutch of Time. Despite passing ages, the feeling of love is always there and this is what finds an apparent treatment in the following lines impregnated with metaphoric excellence and the poetic skills.
Time transgresses
Over wealthy age.
Lamp of love
Still continues to burn
Behind the eagerness
Of perennial urge.
Apt usage of metaphors and other poetic devices lends extra beauty to this extra-ordinary, lyrical and wonderful casket of love poems.
Prof. Sudhir K. Arora writes, in Creation and Criticism Journal, Jan 2017:
The poet in Padhy is a traveller who soars high on the wings of imagination and sings the songs of love that echo and re-echo in the hearts of the readers who are also on the journey of life in the quest of blissful love:
His inner sun begins to swim with her “passionate waves.” He hears the “symphony of love” and feels that she is “soft, calm and poetic.” The following lines reveal the height of the romantic love:
You wake me up
In my moist dream
And your soft touch
Lulls me to sleep.
Closing my eyes
I search
The shade of light
Over your
Flowery smiles. (14)
He also wonders and begins to think over what makes them one. Her love is nectar which flows from her eyes. He also recalls the time when they quarreled with each other resulting in togetherness after forgetting the argument. He recalls:
I recall
Unmindfully sometimes,
Opinion gets divided
I poise for mine
And you for yours.
After a brief spell
On a different musical tone
We sing together
The same soulful song
Forgetting the argument gap
As a devilish dream (22)
When he is alone, he recalls her. The letter she sends brings “a fresh breeze of remembrance.” Love for him is “an act of creation.” Soon a baby is born. He welcomes the beloved’s womanhood that offers him “a gateway to another new poem.” She assimilates love for a noble cause. Both of them discover “petals of love and glee” in the sunny and innocent smiles of their kids. He feels that these are the flowers of love that “confer together” while “weaving the inspiring Generation link.” He goes back and reminds in order to read the poetry of love. He is thankful that time has enriched them with beauty and bliss that will lead them towards “a divine journey.” He knows that their love is “a ceaseless / melodious celebration.” Their love is the lamp and they themselves are its brightness. They are the rhythm to the song of love. Their journey is “an extension / of the boundless voyage.” With “nostalgic memories”, they hope to realise the “sun of a new bright light” so that they may walk the cosmic path together with “the evolutionary smile.” The poem that begins with the physical ends with the sublime. Physical love ends with the passage of time but the sublime love with which the lover in Padhy is blessed continues to shine and shower blessings which lead to celebration.
I express my indebtedness to the esteemed reviewers who interpret the essence of love poems with distinct delicacy and poeticism. The poetic ecstasies and journey of human life are parallel and perennial, beyond space and time. Life is a poem, music its journey! Poetry is a stream murmuring our emotional resonance. I wish to conclude with admiration for poetry:
I choose poetry
The power of feminism:
The symbol of divinized muse
That mingles with
The gentle flow of a river
And confluences with
The vastness of the sea
It discovers the calmness
Of the rising sun
And enlightens the joy of life
Blooming within
the resonance of deep silence.
Brief-Bio:
Pravat Kumar Padhy holds a Master of Science and a Ph.D from Indian Institute of Technology, ISM Dhanbad. He is a mainstream poet and a writer of Japanese short forms of poetry (haiku, tanka, haiga, haibun, tanka prose). His poem “How Beautiful” is included in the undergraduate curriculum at the university level. Pravat’s haiku own The Kloštar Ivanić International Haiku Award, Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival Invitational Award, IAFOR Vladimir Devidé Haiku Award, Setouchi Matsuyama Photo Haiku Award, and others. His haiku are featured at Mann Library, Cornell University, Red Moon Anthology and tanka is figured in “Kudo Resource Guide”, University of California, Berkeley. His Taiga (Tanka-Photo) is posted in the 20th Anniversary Taiga Showcase of American Tanka Society and recently at Haiku North America Conference.
Pravat is nominated as the panel judge of ‘The Haiku Foundation Touchstone Awards’, USA and he is presently on the editorial board of the journal, ‘Under the Basho’.
Pravat is nominated as the panel judge of ‘The Haiku Foundation Touchstone Awards’, USA and he is presently on the editorial board of the journal, ‘Under the Basho’.
Guest Blog 12
Ceri Evans discusses her blog, Read and Review It.
The Importance of Saying Yes
By Ceri Evans
Ever since I can remember, I have wanted to write.
Sure, it sounds cliche, but the very foundation of my childhood was a love for literature - from writing princess stories for my younger sister to staying up way past my bedtime reading,
everything was fueled by my desire to write. Writing is my passion; it always has been.
And so, when, just over a year ago, a new friend of mine mentioned her book blog, I was intrigued. The idea of my writing being out there in the world thrilled me, and it seemed like the perfect way to combine my two passions.
So I set up a wordpress account, selected a theme, and carefully chose a name… Before doing absolutely nothing. Sure, I liked the idea in theory, but what if no one read it? What if it turned out to be my biggest failure? I couldn’t risk that.
And I let those fears control me. I logged out and never looked at that old account again.
But, a few months later, it was time to start thinking about university applications, and I needed something to make me stand out. As soon as I thought about writing my personal statement I knew that having a blog would be the ideal solution - and it gave me an excuse to finally pull myself together and go after what I wanted!
So I set up a wordpress account, selected a theme, and carefully chose a name… Before hitting publish. Was it absolutely terrifying? Yes. Was I scared that it would just sit there, on some unseen corner of the internet, simply existing? Absolutely.
But I did it anyway.
Something I’ve learned whilst blogging is the importance of not letting fear dictate your actions, as well as not worrying too much about what other people think. Sure, I could have given up after that first post got something like five views, but I didn’t. I kept at it, and, slowly, those views turned into something more, with thousands of comments in just over seven months. With hard work, I turned things around, and with that came some truly lovely readers.
But you know what? Even if they all left, I would still carry on, because I’m doing what I love, and that’s all that matters.
And yes, it isn’t easy. I don’t think anyone ever realises how much work goes into blogging before actually experiencing it. The seemingly endless hours spent promoting posts on social media can really take a toll on you, and I quickly learnt that it’s common to spend more time on social media than the actual writing, which is crazy. When you add on the time spent doing the actual reading, too, it’s a wonder I have any sort of life outside of my blog.
But I do. And I wouldn’t change it for the world - my blog is definitely up there with the most rewarding things in my life right now, and it all stemmed from me facing those initial fears and building up my confidence.
If blogging has taught me anything, it’s that I can do anything I set my mind to.
About the Author
Ceri Evans is an avid reader and YA fiction enthusiast. Visit her blog, Read And Review It, to see more of her writing.
Guest Blog 11
Kimberly Katie discusses being an expat over the last three years in Australia.
Experience living in Australia as an American during COVID-19
By Kimberly Katie
My experience being an expat in Australia wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been, but I could for sure see how it was a nightmare for others.
I was lucky to be in a city called Darwin that was hardly affected by Covid. However, there were a lot of scary moments wondering, “What if?”. As an American in Australia on my specific visa (working holiday visa, also called visa 462), you have to work in hospitality for a period of 6 months to earn another year in the country.
When COVID got announced, I was at around the 4-month mark, so I was a bit worried about having to go home sooner than I wanted just because I wouldn’t be able to accumulate the 6-months requirement if my restaurant was forced to shut. To be honest, I don’t feel the Australian government valued temporary foreigners enough. And they had to learn how valuable temporary expats are the hard way.
Even though some people were not able to make their 6-month requirement working in hospitality because their venue was forced to shut down (or if they were doing farm work– which also counts– and they were forced to stop), the government was clear that you’d be out of luck.
Australia had zero interest in being lenient with the requirements to help out foreigners. In other words, they were adamant on, “6 months of work or get out”.
They also gave temporary expats no funds at all, so if they lost hours, there would be no compensation. In fact, some of the rules they did pass actually hurt temporary expats. For example, they basically paid restaurant owners money to roster citizen workers, so essentially, it cost owners $0 to roster citizens. On the other hand, if they wanted to roster temporary expats, restaurant owners would have to pay for them. So, of course, restaurant owners would want to give the citizens all the hours. Why would you pay $200 to roster the foreigner for 8 hours when you can just roster the citizen for free?
This truly worried me, but thankfully for me, a few citizens at my job left and I was not affected by this in the end after weeks of stress.
So, needless to say, a ton of backpackers could not meet the 6 month rule either because of money or simply not meeting the 6-month requirement and so many backpackers left.
MANY.
And guess what happened?
There was a severe shortage of farm workers and hospitality workers across Australia. Australia started spending millions to advertise and incentivize Australians to work in hospitality or in the farms, but of course, Australian citizens weren’t interested. Not going to lie, it was kind of funny being hit by all the ads and reading the news articles about millions of dollars being spent on advertising and incentives.
Finally, Australia’s government started giving temporary expats a solution to stay longer by working hospitality (COVID visa), but by then it was too late. Many backpackers were gone.
All in all, I didn’t really feel taken care of by Australia during Covid, but I was fortunate enough to work in one of the few restaurants in my city that stayed open throughout.
Guest Blog 10
Elisabeth Horan discusses the inspiration for her poetry collection.
On Writing Ekphrastic Poetry
By Elisabeth Horan
I have been writing poetry for as long as I can remember – and some of my favourite poetry collections that I’ve had the pleasure of publishing with UK and USA small publishers, have been focused on writers and artists I admire.
Frida Kahlo is an artist I have been aware of and have appreciated since college days… (circa 1997)! I wrote The Mask (Nov 3rd, 2021, Broken Spine Arts) as a way of exploring her art on a deeper level.
You see, I connect with her in parallel ways which one would not expect of a gringa and a Mexicana, separated by language, culture, time, country and history…and yet we do.
The way I approach ekphrastic poetry is more personal than perhaps its more traditional forms.
I try to place myself, and my emotions within the artworks. In the case of Kahlo, we have experienced similar pain, similar loss - pressure, artistic perfection and total commitment - the men in our lives - the losses… I feel it is intrinsic to my relationship to her, to include these parallels in the poetry.
The process, then, of writing and editing an ekphrastic poem feels completely different to other forms. You are not just writing your own truth, you are not just beholden to your own standards… With Frida - it is like being entrusted with her biography, over and over again, in every poem.
But I also have to be very sensitive in that I am not Mexican, I am not Latina - I am not even a visual artist… so with every word I write… I am aware and sensitive - I don’t want to take any liberties… only to say that I feel I understand her, and that I want to share my interpretation of her voice. It’s important for me that I stay in constant communication with the Latino and Mexican community - for help with this - as if they could renew my borrowed license to be worthy of writing for Frida as a white American - and so far they have granted me that privilege.
When I approach an artwork, I also want to think about the time period that Kahlo was writing in. Imagine 1920s, 1930s Mexico. This was a society which was very much run by the patriarchy - plus add in the dynamic of the accepted ‘machismo’ which rules to this day the lives and loves of men and women. Frida was very much beholden to Diego for taking her in as a mentee - most women at that time would have been housewives and nothing more… let alone depicting artwork of vaginas and Marxism and having such a strong voice to question the status quo. I mean my goodness, her art was fearless! What she said in her paintings took absolute balls, and so that is what I try to do in the poems - match her intensity - match her fearlessness. She might have been afraid to send them into the public - as I often am with some of my poetry - but she did it anyway.
So I have studied her - read about her life, but honestly I derive most of my poetic retellings through the paintings themselves…
That said, it is all non-fiction. I don’t make anything up about her in these poems… it’s all based on true history. Amazing life she had - de veras.
The result of approaching a poem from both a personal and a historical viewpoint has resulted in my work having a melding of voices, and I’m very proud of the intimacy of it. And I like to think Frida would be as well.
When I set out to write the collection, I really just wanted to give Frida center stage - to let her speak once more to her fans, to the masses, to the women and male feminists - to see her. She was just a person, a woman, trying hard to be noticed for her art - no different than me. She had a soul and a body - and both were wounded… but she carried on… always painting until the day she died. I hope my readers can be inspired by that strength.
Bio: Elisabeth Horan is a poet, mother, and small press publisher living in the wilds of Vermont. She is the author of numerous poetry chapbooks and collections, and the Editor-In-Chief of Animal Heart Press. Elisabeth is passionate about discovering new voices and mentoring emerging poets.
She is also a fierce advocate for those impacted by mental illness. The Mask is the follow up collection to collection Horan’s Self-Portrait, and is the third chapbook to be published by The Broken Spine.
Guest Blog 9
An introduction to literature in Taiwan.
A Bookstore in Central Taiwan
What is there at the center of your country?
Here in Taiwan, there is a town called Puli(埔里).
It's famous for its beautiful nature and is one of the popular tourist spots in Taiwan, attracting city dwellers and foreigners. The former for escaping the hustle and bustle, the latter for a part of the journey for witnessing the unique culture and lifestyle of Taiwan.
And this is where we are, running a small independent bookstore, B&B Trade Winds(貿易風書旅).
On this page, we’d like to let you know a little bit about us.
Cultural Exchange through Literature and Art
The main focus of our business is to create opportunities for local people to learn and enjoy the different cultures.
We have a lot of books written in English and Japanese. Using those materials, we’ve been doing reading classes. It's not just learning languages and how to read. We can discuss the differences between each culture with hints which were found in the books.
We also try to create communications through art. We hold movie nights regularly where we watch different kinds of movies and share options with each other. And Inviting artists and writers, we do workshops too.
Because of language barriers, it’s challenging sometimes for sure. But, unlike cities, there’re not so many chances in the town for local people to experience cultural exchanges like these. We thought there’s significance in creating a place where locals can go easily and enjoy learning about other cultures.
We’d like to bring a breath of fresh air into this town.
Stay Overnight at A Bookstore
Did you ever stay up all night because the book you were reading was too good to close or have too many books you wanted to read?
Maybe you did when you’re a kid or teenager.
Now life is busy. There’s no time to fully immerse ourselves into reading in everyday life. Having an hour to read is not easy.
But if you are a book lover, it can be frustrating. Sometimes you may think you just want to be alone. To reread your favorite books, tackle a pile of to-be-read books or try completely new genres. Or, to get back to yourself.
We are on your side. We have created a place where you can be alone with only books.
You can rent out the entire first floor (our store is on the first and second floor of a four-story building) for a day. You can hog it. Explore different kinds of books and get absorbed in reading all day. Or, spend the day sightseeing and enjoy reading at night. It's up to you.
We have coffee and several kinds of tea, which are locally made, and also have handmade snacks. So you can relax. No one will stop you from going into the book world.
Just one day. Just one night. Why don’t you get away from everything and shut yourself in a hideout?
Hit the Road with Dreams on the Back
We have a small van.
Painted in white and yellow, it may look charming at the first glance, but it’s quite beat up actually. We've already sent it for repair several times.
But this hoopty has been doing a great job for us so far.
We occasionally leave the town and go out to various places for book fairs. We’ve been to Taipei(台北), Hualien(花蓮), Chiayi(嘉義), Pingtung(屏東) and a few other places.
When we went to Hualien, we had to cross a huge mountain(3,282m). That made us a little bit anxious if we could make it. Not only the van is old, but it also had lots of books on its back. It seemed not a good idea, but, without any problems, this van brought us to the destination.
It’s fun to travel around Taiwan and know a little bit about other cities. And more than anything else, we can meet new people at each event. It’s exciting and encouraging just to know there are so many book lovers all over the place.
Without this van, we can’t have those experiences. We're proud of our precious buddy.
Hope it’ll be active as long as possible. Our journey will continue.
On the Way
That's it!!
Thank you for reading. We are honored to have an opportunity to introduce our book store.
What we want to try next is to find new local artists and collaborate with them. We need to explore more about what we can do to contribute to the local society.
We’re still working on many things.
Guest Blog 8
Rebecca Buchanan discusses when to take a breather with writing.
On the Importance of Saying No
by Rebecca Buchanan
As writers, we are often admonished to “never give up.”
Don’t quit, the old adage goes. Don’t abandon your dreams. Keep going. Keep creating, keep writing, no matter what.
After many, many years of constantly pushing myself — of long nights and early mornings, of increasing stress and desperation — I finally realized that the opposite is the case. We should be telling ourselves and one another, “Yes, give up.” We should be giving ourselves and one another permission to stop, to quit, to rest. We should be able to say “no,” especially to and for ourselves.
Every month, I write at least one new installment in a serialized novel (minimum three thousand words) as well as a stand-alone story or a shorter serialized work (another three to four thousand words). This is in addition to volunteering as the editor-in-chief of a literary nonprofit, beta reading other authors’ work, writing book reviews, crafting my own poetry, submitting to professional venues, and assembling my short story and poetry collections that are in varying stages of development.
All this while working full-time.
For some authors, that's easy. For me, it is just barely manageable. Usually. Now and again, though, it becomes too much. Work takes up more of my time and energy than expected. Family shows up and takes over the house. Illness. Home repairs. Garden projects. Life.
When that happens, I give myself permission to take a step back and say “no.”
Such was the case a few months ago. I was finishing up one serialized story, I had the first chapter for a new story complete, and I still needed to write the next installment of my novel. Three thousand words. But the deadline was fast approaching, work was chaotic, and a succession of guests was devouring my “spare” time.
Rather than attempt that next installment, I posted the first part of my new story at the deadline. I called it a sneak peek, a teaser for my readers; something they could look forward to next year.
Could I have written those three thousand words in between cooking, baking, cleaning, entertaining, and running errands? Maybe. But they would have been terrible words: rushed, unpolished, and unhappy. Not the words, not the story, that I wanted out in the world. Not the words that I knew that I could create if I had the focus, the energy, and the time.
So I said “no.”
And now I have the time.
The words have continued to evolve, the story to build and grow in my head. I can put it all together now, happily, without rushing, and still have the time to primp and polish before sending it out into the world..
My readers will have the story they deserve.
And so will I.
So give yourself permission. Maybe you just need to pause, to rest and regroup. Maybe you just need to sit still and let the idea work itself out in your head. Maybe you need to stop, for now, because you don’t have the words yet, but you will in five years when your skills have improved. Maybe you need to flat out quit, because this just isn’t your story to tell; it belongs to someone else.
So stop. Quit. Say no.
And, when the time and the words are right, say yes.
Rebecca Buchanan is the editor of the Pagan literary ezine Eternal Haunted Summer, and is a regular contributor to ev0ke: witchcraft*paganism*lifestyle.
She has been published in a wide variety of venues, a complete list of which can be found on EHS.
Guest Blog 7
Hayden Trenholm discusses turning the page as a writer.
The Road Goes Ever On
By Hayden Trenholm
Careers – whether in law, plumbing or art – have a beginning, middle and end. Though exceptions abound (Robertson Davies famously started a new short story the day he died at age 90), most writing careers begin to taper off around the age of seventy.
The reasons are as many as there are writers. For a few, they find they have told every story they wanted to tell. For a few others, the gradual fading of physical or mental abilities take the edge off the desire to spend hours working away at a desk. And, sadly, for many, maybe the majority, the creative spark remains but the market has moved on. They have stories to tell but not ones that editors are willing to buy or readers are willing to read. Or, quite simply, they have fallen out of fashion. Fresh voices and all that.
No matter. While a career may dead end, the path of creativity, the path of story, the path of art never ends. Some begin to explore other routes. Joni Mitchell shifted her focus from music to painting. A playwright friend has become a sculptor. A dancer I know now makes jewelry.
As for me, my career, such as it was, centered on writing, editing and publishing science fiction. Gradually, each of these have slipped away. I closed my publishing company, Bundoran Press, last year, and this year I decided to give up freelance editing; I’m currently finishing up my last contract. I still write science fiction but I doubt I will produce many more stories; on some days, I doubt I will sell the ones I’ve already written.
Instead, I’ve
embarked on an epic series of mysteries set in Paris between the wars. I’ve self-published two and started a third but have a plan for nine more. A friend kindly asked me recently if I thought I’d live that long. I retorted that it should only take five or six more years (longer if I actually write the Roman-era mysteries I plan to start next year) and besides I have a back-up plan.
I’ve begun to write poetry. Which made him laugh. Repeating what several other friends have said: You are the last person I would ever expect to do that. Apparently, I’ve kept my sensitive nature well hidden.
I may never become a published poet. Hell, I may never even show a finished poem to anyone at all. But that is not the point. Writing poetry is a creative challenge; writing a good poem is as hard as writing a short story. Writing a great one is beyond the grasp of all but a few.
It’s not that I can take up sculpture (too many sharp objects) or painting (I’d get more on myself than the canvas) or dancing (with my knees!).
So, mystery novels and poetry are my path for the foreseeable future.
This is not a strategy to fill in time until I die. This is a mission to squeeze every last iota of creative pleasure out of every day. Besides, I might get good at it. I already think my murder mysteries are as good as my (award-winning) science fiction.
As for poetry, I take comfort from several things. A good friend, approaching her 80th birthday, just sold her second collection to a leading literary publisher. And, it is a well documented fact, that scientists, generally though to do their best work in their 20s and 30s, experience a renaissance of creative insight when they change disciplines. Like my artist friends mentioned above, new challenges lead to fresh discoveries. Best of all, it makes them happy.
Personally, if I had to choose between having a successful and lucrative writing career and writing one truly great poem, I’d pick the latter. Whatever you choose, follow that path as far as your spirit will take you.
Hayden Trenholm is a produced playwright and published author. His plays have been produced in the Northwest Territories, Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan and on CBC radio.
In 1993, his play, Man of No Name, was a finalist in the Theatre BC play competition and, in 1994, he won the 28th Alberta Playwriting Completion with The Book of Rose. In addition to six stage plays, he wrote and acted in over forty-five interactive murder mysteries for Pegasus Performances, appearing across western Canada and, even, in Las Vegas.
Guest Blog 6
Tony PIsculli discusses problem solving in theatre productions.
On Directing: The Crux
by Tony Pisculli
When I approach a script as a director, the first thing I do is try to identify the crux—the most challenging aspect of the play for the audience. What’s the one thing that’s going to most interfere with their appreciation of the show?
For example, my Hawaii Shakespeare Festival co-founder R. Kevin Garcia Doyle likes to say that the key to directing comedy is making the audience laugh in the first sixty seconds. How then to handle the opening scene of Comedy of Errors, which is a nearly uninterrupted tragic monologue of exposition which isn’t funny? That’s the crux.
With The Taming of the Shrew, the crux is likely to be Kate’s servile profession of love to Petruchio, who’s been heaping abuse on her for the entire play.
Resolving this will have ramifications for the entire production process—from casting to costuming to staging—and will depend enormously on the specific audience I’m directing for. If they expect a happy ending, I need to find a way soften the impact of Petruchio’s abusive behavior or somehow redeem his character. For a more sophisticated audience, I can deliver a deconstruction of marriage-as-happy-ending. The idea isn’t so much to arrive at the “correct” interpretation as to determine what’s the likely sticking point for the audience, then bend the entire production process toward resolving it.
Recently I directed Henry IV, Part One for the Hawaii Shakespeare Festival and, among the many challenges that script presents, the one that stood out to me is that the central conflict revolves around a number of characters who don’t appear on stage until after intermission. One—Edmund Mortimer—is mentioned twenty times before the audience ever lays eyes on him. These historical figures would have been familiar to Shakespeare’s audience but not to ours.
Henry IV, Part One is among Shakespeare’s most engaging and accessible history plays with a surprising amount of humor and heart.
I was confident that the audience would engage with the personal drama of Prince Hal choosing between his actual father, the cold and distant King, and his surrogate father, the lovable rogue Falstaff, if I didn’t first lose them with the politics of the court that lead to rebellion and war. I had to find a way to introduce the off-stage characters to the audience earlier.
One way to tackle that would be with a program note, but, in my experience, no one reads those except reviewers. My next idea was to have the actor playing Edmund Mortimer literally come out and introduce herself to the audience—“I’m Victoria Kashiwai. I play Edmund Mortimer, a character that is often mentioned but doesn’t appear until after intermission, so I thought I’d come out and introduce myself. Hello.” Then, having established the meta-theatricality of Mortimer, have him introduce and/or comment on other significant characters as they are mentioned.
The final idea came from
my Associate Director, Kelsey Baehrens, who suggested we stage the fight between Hotspur and the Douglas that sparks the initial conflict.
(In the script, this fight is reported in a dispatch but never seen.) We expanded on this idea to create a dumbshow of every major character mentioned in the first scene, including Prince Hal. This gave the audience a visual reference for each name, alerted them to the significance of the character to the story and gave them a visual reference for each name so they would recognize the character when they appeared later. It also allowed us to bring Hal and Hotspur, protagonist and antagonist, together at the beginning of the show as a preview of their climactic fight at the end of the play. (We also kept Mortimer’s introduction which gave the audience permission to laugh and helped dispel the air of reverence which audiences sometimes bring to a Shakespeare production that can interfere with their genuine enjoyment.)
Any play will have challenges for the actors, the designers and the directing team, but I don’t worry about those initially.
I know we’ve got the entire rehearsal process to sort them out. But the audience only gets one chance to experience the show. There’s no pause, no rewind. They can’t flip back a few pages to see what they missed. My goal is to serve the audience. That’s why I make identifying and addressing the crux my priority.
Tony Pisculli is the co-founder and producer of the Hawaii Shakespeare Festival, now entering its 14th season. At HSF in 2016 he presented an experimental version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in invented language--aActually, in two invented languages, one for the Greek court and mechanicals, and another for the fairies.
Tony is also Hawaii’s premiere fight choreographer and has been teaching stage combat and directing fights for more than 20 years. He is a Master Teacher with Dueling Arts International and has choreographed over 100 productions including stage, indie film, opera and burlesque. He is currently living in Hawai‘i and is a recent graduate of the Stone Coast Creative Writing program, and the author of a novel now out on submission.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tony.pisculli
Twitter: @tonypisculli
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tony-pisculli-3864682/
Guest Blog 5
Gordon Linzner discusses the beginnings of Space and Time.
Origins of the Space and Time Continuum
By Gordon Linzner
Over half a century ago, four high school juniors were sharing, for our personal amusement, comic strips about a character we created named Edgar, along with his friend Alan and pet Poe. We decided to print a collection of these to hand out to fellow classmates.
To this end,
we invested the huge sum of $20 on a used mimeograph machine. The print quality of this device looked far more professional and lasting than the blue-tinted ditto machines commonly used in schools.
For those of you born after the moon landings, to create mimeographed copies one had to work directly on a stencil, which was then attached to an ink-saturated roller. Paper was cranked through and given a few seconds to dry.
Stencil-cutting turned out more difficult than these teenagers expected. Stencils tore easily if you pressed too hard. Ink wouldn’t flow evenly if you didn’t press hard enough. While the more artistic of us worked on that problem, I didn’t want this high-tech equipment to sit idle in my basement.
Typing (pre-electric) provided a more consistent pressure, and we decided as a stop gap to turn out a fiction magazine with a couple simple illustrations. Science fiction, of course.
I’d been writing since first grade, so took over editorial duties (my mother taught me to read at such an early age my kindergarten teacher asked me to read aloud to the class once or twice). We chose the inclusive if not terribly original name Space and Time.
The first issue literally rolled off the press in 1966.
That was fun! Let’s do it again next year! With twice the pages! And get a few classmates to contribute, as well!
By 1968 we discovered photo-offset: faster, cleaner, and not much more expensive. Our third issue was a hybrid, after which the mimeograph was abandoned to its own fate.
My associates soon moved on, though not until we put out four issues of the satirical Edgar magazine. But I was hooked. Word of the magazine’s existence got out. I received contributions from strangers like (to list a handful at random) Darrell Schweitzer, David C. Smith, Charles Saunders, Stephen Bissette, and Frank Miller. I traded with other zines. At one point, to keep S&T purely fiction, I added the review zine Now to Deal with You! which lasted six issues, and another half dozen issues of the satire zine, Uncle Gordon’s Comics and Stories.
Originally I ran two or three of my own stories in each issue, under various pseudonyms. Now that I was getting so much publishable material, there was no need. I reached out to other markets with my own work, establishing my own writing career.
(A side note: editing S&T taught me more, and faster, about writing than I might otherwise have learned. Seeing where someone else’s work went astray, then recognizing the same flaws in my own work, was invaluable... and humbling. I also learned how to delegate as the need arose for a volunteer staff).
You’d think all this would have been satisfying, but I was still a glutton for punishment. In 1984, with the magazine still going, I started a small press book line.
Time marches on. After forty years, I had to give up the magazine, which turned out for the best. The new owners, Hildy Silverman and, later, Angela Yuriko Smith, not only kept it alive, but taken it places I would not have felt capable of. The book line, after sitting idle too long, was recently turned over to my colleague, Faith L. Justice, who also publishes historical fiction under the name of Raggedy Moon Press.
And I’m told 2022 will mark the initiation of the Linzner Award, honoring the best stories published in the magazine the previous year.
Tell that to that 16-year-old nerd who started it all and he’d laugh in your face. Or just nod as he slowly backed away. He was such a shy child.
For those of you wishing to dive a little deeper:
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?25515 you can follow the evolution of the magazine’s cover art. This site is great for looking up tons of sf/fantasy related publications.
https://spaceandtime.net/ Official home of the magazine now. Angela and her staff have taken things technologically far further than I feel capable of myself. Check it out.
https://raggedymoonbooks.com/ This is Faith Justice’s historical book line, but she also now handles S&T’s bookline. Although a separate web page for those isn’t up yet, she can send you a list of titles to track down on Amazon. Ask nicely.
Gordon Linzner is founder and former editor/publisher of Space and Time Magazine. He is the author of the novels The Spy Who Drank Blood, The Oni, and The Troupe, as well as dozens of short stories appearing in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Twilight Zone, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, and numerous other magazines and anthologies
Guest Blog 4
Jill Hand discusses her favorite haunted house stories, just in time for Halloween.
The Haunted House: A Cautionary Tale
Jill Hand
The story goes something like this: someone moves to a new town. They look everywhere, but there’s no housing available at a price they can afford. Then they get a pleasant surprise. A nice house is vacant (sometimes it’s an apartment.) To their delight, the rent is far less than they expected.
At this point, anyone reading knows what’s about to happen. There’s a reason why the rent is so low. The property is haunted and the hapless tenant becomes thoroughly terrified. It’s a theme that’s familiar, but no less enjoyable.
What makes stories about haunted houses so frightening is that the terrifying activity takes place where the victims expected to be safe. Our homes are our refuge. It’s where we go to retreat from the world. What could be more horrifying than having our refuge turn into a chamber of horrors?e it stand out
Four of my favorite short horror stories are about haunted houses. Two are by Bithia Mary Croker, an Irish novelist who had a prolific literary career, starting in 1882 and ending with her death in 1920. “To Let” takes place in a resort town in India during the time of the British Raj. A woman fears she waited too long to find a house for her family to rent, but then, surprise! There’s a wonderful house available, luxuriously furnished and equipped, down to the last silver teaspoon. There’s only one problem. I don’t want to spoil the story for anyone who hasn’t read it by saying what it is, but it’s not something anyone would want to experience for themselves.
“Number Ninety” is another of Croker’s great haunted house stories. A man attending a dinner party ridicules the idea of haunted houses. He accepts a challenge to spend the night in a vacant house reputed to be haunted and has a disturbing experience. Then he does something absolutely crazy. He goes back the following night to try and get to the bottom of things. His second nocturnal visit does not end well.
“The Story of Clifford House” first appeared in December 1878 in The Mistletoe Bough, edited by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. It’s credited to an anonymous author and has all the elements of a classic haunted house tale. A beautiful house is available to rent for next to nothing during the height of the London “season.”
A family moves in, and after initially feeling smug at having such a fancy crib they’re scared out of their wits. In this case it’s not only a cautionary tale about accepting a bargain at face value, it’s also a warning of what can happen to people who go to the big city intending to plunge into the social scene, instead of quietly staying home where they belong.
“The Toll-House,” by W.W. Jacobs, author of “The Monkey’s Paw,” is the last of my favorite quartet of haunted house tales. Four men on a walking tour become bored with their usual routine. They opt to spend the night in an empty house reputed to be haunted. Bad things ensue. It’s truly chilling.
The End
Author’s Bio
Author Jill Hand is a member of the Horror Writers Association and International Thriller Writers. Her Southern Gothic novel, White Oaks, is scheduled for release May 30, 2019 from Black Rose Writing.
Advance readers call it a fast-paced, hilarious account of three siblings who are competing for their father’s forty-billion-dollar fortune while trying to prevent the destruction of Planet Earth. Diane Donovan, senior reviewer from Midwest Book Review, praised White Oaks, calling it, “an unusually multifaceted tale that holds the ability to prompt laughter from thriller-style tension.” Jill Hand’s novel, Rosina and the Travel Agency, and The Blue Horse, a novella, follow the adventures of a young woman rescued from a terrible railway accident in 1889 by a twenty-fourth-century enterprise known as the Travel Agency, which is in the business of time travel tourism.
Guest Blog 2
Steven R. Southard aka Poseidon’s Scribe joins Samjoko Magazine today to talk about beginnings.
The Thrill and Terror of Beginnings
Steven R. Southard aka Poseidon’s Scribe
If you’re a writer starting a new story, or an editor starting a new online magazine, or anyone beginning a new project of any kind, the beginning is thrilling and terrifying.
Thrilling because you’re imagining how great it will be when it’s finished, how much others will appreciate it.
Terrifying because there’s a chance you’ll fail, produce something awful, and all your hard work will be for nothing.
Though we can’t see the future, we can remember our past, both the successes and the failures. Our past successes give us confidence, but our past failures make us cautious.
Hindsight may be 20/20, but foresight is beyond 20/200, the definition of legally blind. Our future self knows how things will turn out, but can’t tell us.
The beginning is a time of infinite promise, of wondrous expectations, of boundless hope. But our minds tinge those feelings with understandable doubt, worry, and even dread.
All great projects in history had beginnings, and those in charge felt the same way you do now. Before Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, he likely fretted about whether his contemporaries would applaud it. Before the Egyptian pyramid designers begin work, they must have felt trepidation, too. What would the pharaoh do if the structure collapsed?
Perhaps the thrill and terror we feel are not only understandable, not only inevitable, but perhaps also necessary. Without some measure of thrill, we’d never begin anything. Without feeling some terror, we’d embark on stupid, pointless, unplanned projects and almost always fail.
In his book Zen in the Art of Writing, Ray Bradbury captured the combination of thrill and terror in an interesting way. After reading an Irish police report about a man being “drunk and in charge of a bicycle,” Bradbury decided that phrase described how he wrote stories.
Perhaps that condition—drunk and in charge of a bicycle—describes the beginning of all stories, the start of all worthwhile endeavors.
[Safety Note: When I use Bradbury’s phrase, I’m using it metaphorically. I do not endorse operating any sort of vehicle, including a bicycle, while intoxicated.]
If thrill and terror, in some combination, must accompany the beginning of your project, then I suggest you temper those emotions with an objective, rational outlook.
In other words, don’t go pedaling down that path without planning your route first. Channel the energy of the thrill and terror you feel into visualizing, preparing, and organizing your effort. As Plato said, “The beginning is the most important part of the work.”
Allow some
flexibility in your plans, though. Realize that circumstances may alter your vision along the way. As Martin Luther King Junior put it, “You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”
With your feelings of thrill and terror, regulated by rational organization, I wish you luck as you begin your story. I wish Todd Sullivan (and the rest of the staff at Samjoko) luck as they introduce their magazine to the world.
If the American Indian proverb is true, that “No river can return to its source, yet all rivers must have a beginning,” then may the river of your project flow with a strong and long-lasting current. Begin now!
Steven R. Southard aka Poseidon’s Scribe
Steven R. Southard’s short stories appear in over a dozen anthologies including Not Far from Roswell, Re-Terrify, and Quoth the Raven. He co-edited the anthology 20,000 Leagues Remembered. An engineer and former submariner, Steve takes readers on voyages to far-off places and long-ago times aboard amazing vehicles accompanied by engaging characters. Steve scribbles in several genres including steampunk, clockpunk, science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Set sail to stevenrsouthard.com to learn more about his fictional adventures.
Guest Blog 1
We all have obsessions. Mine is with how we carry our cultures. Some years ago, a publisher asked me “What is your dream anthology?”
Gillian Polack joins Samjoko Magazine today to discuss an anthology she compiled and edited. Read her blog below.
Gillian Polack
We all have obsessions.
Mine is with how we carry our cultures. Some years ago, a publisher asked me “What is your dream anthology?” I replied, “I would love to edit an anthology about Australian cultural baggage. A speculative fiction anthology. I know exactly which authors I would invite.” Sharyn Lilley, the editor, said to me “Invite them then, for I want to read that book.”
I had two lists of dream writers for this perfect anthology, but I never reached the second because acceptances from the first list filled the volume. We called it Baggage. It was seen and loved and sold out of its print run very, very quickly.
A US publisher took the baton for it when the Borders’ collapse took Baggage out of print. It’s been available in the US since 2014. Available but not visible. No-one was talking about it, because no-one knew it was back in print. They also didn’t know how amazing the stories were. Each and every author took my idea and turned it into something special. Such an amazing set of stories should not be invisible, which is why it’s the subject of today’s post. Let me introduce you to each of the stories, in the order they appear in the book.
The authors are some of Australia’s best. I’m very, very fortunate to have worked with them.
How do I explain K. J. Bishop’s fiction without referring to The Etched City? I can’t. How can I explain The Etched City? I also can’t. Her story “Vision Splendid” in Baggage is the far end of the science fictional spectrum to The Etched City, in any case. It’s about the beauty in small things, and the shape of a human life..
Jack Dann is best known for a prize-winning novel, The Memory Cathedral. I love that novel so much that no-one may borrow my copy of it. Not ever. When I asked him for something about cultural baggage he said, “I have a very special poem.” He had permission to write about the experience that’s at the heart of the poem. A rare moment of his life telescoped into a poem.
Kaaron Warren is one of the world’s best horror writers. Whenever anyone asks me to explain her writing, I have a bad habit of saying, “Imagine that the protective outer layer of your skin has been peeled off, and that a bad wind blows over it, cold and chill and dangerous.”
My favourite editing experience was when I worked with Yaritji Green. All the stories in the volume draw on the writer’s cultural background and so Yaritji drew on her mother’s Yankunytjatjara culture. The writing and editing took on a very special shape as the story was approved by Elders at every stage. It’s another small story that is big, about what death means and how important respect can be.
Janeen Webb wrote me a story called “Manifest Destiny.” Janeen is an historian as well as a fiction writer and she is such a wordsmith that, when I read the first draft of her tale, it felt seamlessly nineteenth century. It tells us of explorers and settlers and dreams and nightmares.
A New Zealand glacier is one of Lucy Sussex’s characters in “Albert & Victoria/Slow dreams”. It’s another of the clever and thoughtful stories in this volume that undercut assumptions that European-origin people carry with us into places that are not, were not ever really European.
Most readers know Jennifer Fallon for her exciting trilogies. Much adventure. Fascinating characters. Big fat fantasy or science fantasy at its very best. The story she wrote me is entirely different. “Macreadie v The Love Machine” is sardonic and sarcastic and a bit sly. It’s set in Sydney in the near future and has a famous actor at its heart. This story mocks the Australia we all think we know.
Maxine McArthur has slipped out of view recently, but, before then, she wrote some of the best Australian hard SF around. Her fictional spaceship felt so real that someone built it. “A Pearling Tale” is, however, more of a ghost story, set in our far north. It feels no less real. Every time I read it, I grip the desk at a particular point, just to remind myself that I’m at my desk and not on a dangerous voyage.
In every good volume, there’s a story that takes off the safety harness and roams into places that no-one has ever gone. Tessa Kum wrote that story for Baggage. “Acception” is about multiculturalism torn apart and people’s lives destroyed. It hurts to read and it’s impossible to stop reading. It’s brilliant.
I followed “Acception” by a story full of heart, because “Acception” is so full of hurt. Laura E. Goodin’s “An Ear for Home” tells us of sound and light and being impossibly far from home.
Deborah Biancotti’s “Home Turf” is all about the legacy of war, and about Sydney. I haven't been to Sydney in far too long because of perpetual lockdowns. “Home Turf” is an embattled Sydney and perfect reading for right now.
Monica Carroll is a Canberra author and not well-known outside Canberra. This is a great pity. She’s a literary writer, who embeds the fantastic deeply into her tale. “Archives, space, shame, love” itself is about memory and life and paper and dreams.
The last story is by Simon Brown. He’s a good novelist but an amazing short story writer. This is why he has the last word.
Gillian Polack bio:
Dr Gillian Polack is an award-winning Australian writer and editor. She was recently awarded the A Bertram Chandler Award, for lifetime achievement. Her most recent novels are The Green Children Help Out, Borderlanders, and Poison and Light. Her novels are mostly science fiction and contemporary fantasy, which is a bit odd, for she is an ethnohistorian. Her hobbies include cooking, researching cultures and reading. She claims to have a collection of select and very attractive fans.
Visit her website here.
A Content Creator’s Magazine
A result of the unexpected.
I started thinking about creating an online magazine after I edited and compiled an anthology for my horror publisher in the winter of 2019. As with many people, it’s been a strange two years. COVID has thrown the world for a loop, and its effects don’t seem to be going anywhere any time soon.
Who would have thought
at the beginning of 2019 that they would be where they found themselves at the end of 2020?
The world has experienced something unexpected in the last 24 months, and I am no exception. I discovered the addictive fulfillment of drama writing. I participated in a 3 month web series in Taiwan. I edited and compiled the aforementioned anthology for my publisher. I started a YouTube Channel where I interview publishing writers in English from around the world. I moved back to South Korea after a two year hiatus during which I lived 19 months in Taipei.
And now, I’ve founded
an online magazine: Samjoko.
I’m too much of a hodgepodge of competing and paradoxical whims to have a set aesthetic to this magazine. If the content is good, it’ll find a home at Samjoko. For now, we’re only publishing 15 pieces seasonally. Perhaps that will change if we attract steady readers who want to help us grow through financial support. To reach semi-pro rates for our Contributors is a goal, a wish, a hope.
Professional rates would
be nice, but perhaps if that were to happen, too many strings would be attached.
And so why the title Samjoko? I’ve had a fascination with crows since I used to walk my dog in the park near my home in the 1990s. When I was told about the 3-legged crow of Asian mythology over dinner one night in Seoul, I knew I would adopt the idea, as I’ve absorbed so many concepts over my lifetime.
Samjoko is a magazine of words, of images, of dreams, of philosophies. It is a place of discovery, the meeting place at the crossroads, the fork in the road.
Feel free to explore at your convenience.