I recently found out one of my poems has received an honorable mention in the 2020 Helen Schaible International Sonnet Contest, in the Traditional Sonnet category.  I’ll be reading my Shakespearean sonnet, “Kintsugi Master Pieces,” at the awards ceremony on Sunday, November 15, at 11am PST.  It will be on Zoom, so I hope you can join us for a celebration of verse and voices.  For more info. about accessing the event, visit https://www.poetsandpatrons.net/sonnet-contest.

As I’m trying to plan some Halloween fun for my kids to compensate for this year’s lack of trick-or-treating, I keep reminiscing about prior Halloweens.  If the Ghost of Halloween Past were to visit me—to remind me of what we may someday get back to during a less “batty” year, surely, not to instill Dickensian remorse—I expect I’d see something of the following:

• Touring the Winchester Mystery House in college, armed with a flashlight, my face painted like a cat thanks to an artistic friend.
• Going with my husband, middle sister, and brother-in-law to watch the Oregon Symphony perform the score to The Nightmare Before Christmas while the film played on a screen over the orchestra.
• The recent years of alternating between taking my kids trick-or-treating and handing out candy, plus seeing all the fun costumes roaming the neighborhood.

Sigh.  I trust the Ghost of Halloween Future has plenty of fun in store. 

Now for some good news, though still related to things dark and monstrous:  I have a new poem up at Sidequest.  “Nightmarens” came about when I was thinking about the bosses from the game NiGHTS: Into Dreams, and my mind filled with words describing them.  I saw their carnival colors and their exaggerated body parts designed to incite fear, since they rule the domain of nightmares.  But they’ve always been my favorite part of the game.  I couldn’t think of them without fondness.  For this poem, I purposely wanted to strain my voice outside of my comfort zone.  I wanted dense prose, a strong style that could stand up to those titular characters.

I’ve been a fan of Tina Connolly for years, so I’m super excited that she’s narrated one of my stories for her podcast, Toasted Cake.  “Exchange (A Coral Study)” is available to listen to now.  This story, which first appeared in Factor Four Magazine, came about when a member of my writing group shared a challenge to incorporate 6 specific words in a story.  I took some memories of visiting the Galápagos Islands and mixed it with my dad’s experience as an international student in college.  I hope this tale helps show how an open mind can create a ripple effect. 

In other news, my latest poem at Sidequest is up, a Spencerian sonnet about an old SEGA Genesis dungeon crawler called Shining in the Darkness.  In the poem it may sound like I’m disparaging the game, but I’m actually very fond of it.  I’ve always loved the storybook graphics, endless pathways forking at right angles, and over-the-top monsters.  It’s just that the game’s title and premise of wandering through a maze set it up so beautifully for symbolism, I couldn’t resist.

My flash story “Fellscorpe and the Wishing Well,” from Heroic Fantasy Quarterly issue 42, has been selected for the Best Indie Speculative Fiction Volume III!  This anthology series highlights some of the best stories of the prior year published by small press publishers or self-published, and I’m so honored to be included.  The anthology should be available later this year.  Stay tuned.

Sidequest has published another of my poems, this one inspired by Lava Reef Zone from one of my all-time favorite video games, Sonic & Knuckles.  This level always stood out to me for the stark difference between Acts 1 and 2, from the colors to the music, the rapid change from fiery to crystal cool. 

This poem was originally going to be about the narrator waiting for the other person to cool down, but I decided I wanted it to be more about shared culpability and recovery, so I changed it.  For research I looked up terms for various cave formations, and once I started reading them the poem practically wrote itself.  Like I mentioned with “The Geologist Speaks,” science can provide so much poetic terminology.

The first of my gaming poems is available now at Sidequest.  Earlier this year I set a goal to write more free verse, since I tend to gravitate toward formal verse.  As I was on a video game poetry kick, I brainstormed characters, settings, items, and moments from games that stood out to me from childhood.  My mind fell upon the magic potion bottles from Super Mario Bros. 2.  I always liked their sleek, bubbly design, and the bizarre place to which they transported you—Subspace, with its striking color palette. 

But perhaps strangest of all was how you used the potion.  Just throw it.  That’s right, chuck the glass container of liquid onto the ground.  How counterintuitive is that? 

A few years back, we held a Mario themed birthday party for one of my sons.  I labeled all the food and drinks with puntastic names and pictures.  We had “Mix Your Own Magic Potions”—lemon lime pop, grenadine syrup, and maraschino cherries.  While reminiscing about that a few months ago, I started wondering what it would be like to actually drink the potion in the game.  And since this was during what’ll hopefully be the height of the COVID-19 shutdown in my area, travel and escape occupied my mind.  As I said at Worldcon, sometimes the poem finds you. 

Now, as wildfires rage across my state and others, the sky bears the rusty yellows and purples of a bruise, and yesterday’s afternoon sun looked like the moon during a lunar eclipse, an eerie pink dot.  Plus, my power was out this morning until about 10 minutes ago.  Kind of feels like I’m in Subspace right now.  I hope everyone stays safe.

Want to find out the connection between my writing process and movie trailers?  Or what industry the Siguenza sisters in “Sasha’s Pattern, Sonia’s Edge” were originally going to work in before I changed it to VR?  Or what was the very first part of “Desert Locks” I ever wrote?  You can find all that and more in my interview with Maggie Slater, in which we talk short story vending machines, COVID-19, and the power of visualizing a table of contents.

I’m super excited to share two pieces of news:  First, author and editor Maggie Slater will be publishing an interview with me on her website early next month.  If you haven’t read Maggie’s work, do yourself a favor and go check it out.  It’s often gritty and always poignant. 

Second, the fine folks at Sidequest will be publishing a series of my poetry in their Game Enjambment column.  My video game themed poems will appear over the course of several months, one poem every couple weeks.  You’ll find a mix of free verse and formal structures, focusing on games from my youth that I played on Nintendo and SEGA systems, plus a few others thrown in there for variety.  I’m glad these poems of mine have found a home at a place that amplifies underrepresented voices in the gaming community.

I enjoyed getting to be a panelist, moderator, and Q&A wrangler at Worldcon this week.  But in my last panel, the one on speculative poetry, I didn’t have a chance to chime in on one audience question because we were almost out of time.  Normally that wouldn’t be an issue, but I’m not convinced we fully answered the submitter’s question.  I’ll try to address it here. 

What do you look for in a good speculative poem?  (I think that was the phrasing.) While I agree with my fellow panelists that it’s highly subjective—indeed, what makes a poem good even if it’s not speculative, or for that matter, what makes a poem a poem in the first place?—I don’t think that’s a satisfying, complete answer.  I believe that through the lens of one’s subjectivity, one can still pinpoint a few criteria that others may find helpful. 

When filtered through my own subjectivity, I look at the following:  1) imagery, 2) word choice, and 3) format.  And these apply to any poem, speculative or not.  When a poet creates striking, memorable images (often constructed from concrete details and engaging multiple senses), using beautiful language (often employing words in unexpected yet effective ways), and arranges it all on the page in a presentation that feels cohesive to what the poem is intended to be (making the poem feel even more like something that only this poet could have created), that combination is most likely to stick with me.  That’s what gets me sneaking back to the poem to revisit that moment, that impression, that alchemy the poet has crafted. 

And yes, what “checks the box” for me will be highly subjective.  When I talk about beautiful language, that can take so many forms.  Horror, humor, despondence, wonder.  It depends on what I interpret to be the poem’s intended effect.  It’s part of the poem’s synergy, how the whole transcends the sum of its parts.  I wish we’d had more time to really do this topic justice.

The schedule for CoNZealand has been posted, and you can find me on these three panels:

Future Economics

In NZST:  29 Jul 2020, Wednesday 1:00pm – 1:50pm

In PDT: 28 Jul 2020, Tuesday 6:00pm-6:50pm

Will we ever fully disentangle from the physical? Blockchains, cryptocurrency, differently organic sentience. Will economic concepts of supply, demand, money, resources hold up? Evolve? Or be completely different?  And what might they look like?

Panelists:  Karl Schroeder, Katherine Quevedo, Eli K. P. William, Jesper Stage

Why We Read/Write/Edit Anthologies

In NZST:  1 Aug 2020, Saturday 6:00pm – 6:50pm

In PDT: 31 Jul 2020, Friday 11:00pm-11:50pm

In a world of Netflix, podcasts, and video games, where the most lucrative advances are from novels at big five publishers, are anthologies still viable? A panel of authors share why they still edit/write for anthologies, list their favorite “good reads” and invite the audience to share their recommendations.

Panelists:  Dr. Jack Dann, Mimi Mondal, Katherine Quevedo, Aidan Doyle

Speculative Poetry 2020 The Rhyme of the SF Mariner

In NZST:  2 Aug 2020, Sunday 11:00am – 11:50am

In PDT: 1 Aug 2020, Saturday 4:00pm-4:50pm

What’s the state of play with science fiction, fantasy and horror poetry in 2020? And how much of a distinction is there between speculative poetry and poetry overall?

Panelists:  Ryn Yee, Brandon O’Brien, Joyce Chng, Katherine Quevedo, Hester J. Rook