Congratulations to the poets selected for the HWA Poetry Showcase X!  Editor Angela Yuriko Smith just announced the table of contents on the HWA’s Youtube channel.  The other judges and I had hundreds of submissions to consider, and ultimately, we could only fit 50 poems into the anthology.  Much gratitude to the writing community for making our job so tough and giving us so many quality poems to consider! 

In addition to the list of poets and the cover reveal, in the video you can find a clip of yours truly at the end, where I offer some thoughts and advice to poets interested in submitting to next year’s anthology.  I learned so much from judging this year, I need to make sure I take my own advice!

TERSE. Journal has just published their Mycelia issue, including my poem “Rhizomorphs.”  In this poem, I put a slightly speculative spin on the world’s largest single organism, a specimen of Armillaria ostoyae located in the Malheur National Forest.  I had a lot of fun making the format mimic the content on this one.

I had such a fun time chatting with Brittany Hause on this month’s episode of the podcast Into the Looking Glass.  We covered a lot of ground, from my upcoming chapbook, to different processes for writing speculative fiction and poetry, to video games.  Be forewarned, this one’s kind of a marathon.  It does follow the format of the other episodes:  interview questions, then a reading, then a writing prompt.  Brittany also has a connection to South America—and does gorgeous translations of speculative poetry from that region—which fed into their very thoughtful questions and our follow-up discussions on those influences for each of us. 

Which poem did I choose to read?  A brand-new prose poem, “The Labyrinth Proper.”  I think this is the first time I’ve had something published in audio before print, although the text will also appear soon in Sidequest. 

I hope you enjoy this glimpse into the connections between Oregon and Ecuador, how I feel about rough drafts, a not-so-proper labyrinth, and more!

I’m behind on providing updates!  Here’s what I’ve been up to these days: 

• I sold a story to Wyldblood Press!  “The Sphinx’s Blind Date” will be part of their Wyld Flash series later this year. 
• I finished judging a bunch of horror poetry for the HWA Poetry Showcase Volume X, and editor Angela Yuriko Smith is compiling some comments from all of this year’s judges.  More to come. 
• I’m excited to be this month’s guest on Jasmine Arch’s Into the Looking Glass podcast about speculative poetry, where the wonderful Brittany Hause and I will share a wide-ranging conversation about specpo and more (episode coming soon). 
• I also wrote the Foreword for Lucky Jefferson’s upcoming anthology, Discover Beaverton, and finished reviewing the submissions with the editor. 
• I have a new video game prose poem forthcoming in Sidequest, and I wrote another installment of the “Level Up Your Poetry” essay series for them, this time on the topic of prose poetry. 

We interrupt this regularly scheduled poetry update to ask you to pause whatever you were planning to do after checking this blog post and go read my friend Maggie Slater’s new story, “Catching College,” in Metaphorosis.  You’re welcome.  I had the honor of reading an earlier draft, right around the time one of my relatives was going through the college application process, and let me tell you, there is so much truth underlying Maggie’s inventive story. 

Moving on from truth to lies, this is what I was originally planning to post today:  I have a new poem in the anthology Anterior Skies, Vol 1: A Genre-Bending Anthology of the Weird and Cosmic.  That part’s not a lie, by the way.  I wrote “The Universe’s Edge” during an online poetry workshop, based on the prompt to write about a lie you were told.  The prompts tended to be aimed at producing autobiographical poetry, but I took them each in a speculative direction.

I have a new poem out in Volume 1.2 of The Sprawl Mag.  “The Llamacorn Herd” imagines a variant of the unicorn—probably more like guanacos than llamas if you get down to it, but anyway…  I pulled from memories of climbing the steps of Barrio las Peñas in Guayaquil with my dad on one trip, and seeing the lighthouse at the top at night with my cousin on another trip.  And although they aren’t Ecuadorian, I did get some Guatemalan worry dolls from my uncle when I was a kid. 

These photos are from years ago.  The lighthouse has since been painted with a thick blue stripe curving up the length, calling to mind the spiral of a unicorn horn.  Er, llamacorn horn. 

I’ll have another writing update soon, with another new poem around the corner. 

The first volume of TOWER Magazine is here, with the theme of END.  My prose poem in it, “The Game of Castle Adventure,” pays homage to the titular computer game from my childhood, where you used a combination of direction keys and two-word commands to navigate a black-and-white setting populated by simple characters—literal characters, as in keyboard symbols.  I played it back in the ’90s as a kid and decided, as an adult, to really put myself inside it with this piece. 

I got really into prose poetry last summer, wanting to expand my skills as a poet and play around with where the format and expectations between verse and story start to get muddied.  The TOWER editors and I even briefly questioned which indentations to use (we went with the same they use for more traditional poetry).  This is the first time I’ve had a prose poem published.  My second one, which I actually wrote right before this one, is due out in the anthology Wind Guide You, also about digital gaming.  More to come on that.

Today I want to share a couple of recent reveals for projects I’m involved with.  

First, Sword & Kettle Press posted images of the covers of all the chapbooks in the New Cosmologies series, and I am in love with all of them!  Monica Robinson has truly knocked it out of the park with these covers.  (And I’ve gotten to see the layout of my chapbook, The Inca Weaver’s Tales, and trust me, Naseem Jamnia has done an equally stunning job with the interior.)  So excited for these to come out, hopefully later this year!

Second, TOWER Magazine posted a list of the contributors to Vol. 1: End, including the final words from each of our pieces.  So cool!  The volume is due to come out in less than two weeks.  Keep an eye out for additional lead-up posts about some of our favorite endings from a variety of media.

My new story, “The Galapagos Widows,” is included in the Spring 2023 issue of LatineLit.  This is probably one of my most personal stories yet.  I based it on some family lore from my dad’s side, along with details from a couple of my trips to South America, including visiting relatives in Ecuador and studying abroad in Chile.  This story is dark, and it deals with real life tragedies.  I of course made things fictionalized and speculative.  I finished the first draft in the span of a week, which is inordinately fast for me, and it took a lot out of me.  I’m not my character Beatriz, but I appreciated getting to process my emotions through her.

Next week, on April 11^th, I’ll be speaking at the Willamette Writers Hillsboro Chapter meeting on the topic Incorporating Your Cultural Roots into Your Writing.  This will be a hybrid event, so you can register in advance to join online, or you can show up in person at the Hillsboro Brookwood Library. 

Then on April 16^th, I’ll be leading an online generative workshop.  It will feature some writing prompts designed to help folks generate potential submissions for the Discover Beaverton anthology, but of course you can do whatever you want with the new work you generate. 

Both of these events are free to attend and open to all writers.  Tell your friends!