Whenworldscollide: Special Edition

One of the categories on this here blog that consistently gets attention, even after individual posts have fallen off most people’s radars, is “whenworldscollide.” That’s where I stick the stuff that lives in the Venn diagram of creative writing, scholarship, librarianship, and academic stuff. 2021’s been busy with that kind of stuff.

Early next year, my essay “Olympia, Wilderness, and Consumption in Laird Barron’s Old Leech Cycle” will be published in Fantastic Cities: American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. Likely not the rubric most people use for thinking about Old Leech, but it worked for me because I kept thinking about how very well Laird Barron does both Olympia and Washington, and also how little academics have yet written about either Barron or fiction set in Olympia. I probably wouldn’t have tried to write this piece back when I was first a librarian, trying to wall off different parts of my life and never really thinking about literary scholarship, but here we are.

Last week I moderated a lively discussion about the future of speculative fiction for James River Writers, the Central Virginia writing org on whose Board of Directors I served some years ago. Our conversation roamed over many topics, but I wound up juggling my writing hat and my library hat a bit, in particular on the question of genre labels and taxonomies. A tough issue that continues to get tougher as readers’ tastes solidify and specify. Many U.S. readers have no nearby bookstore they can happily browse, and many factors (not least the pandemic) have continued to drive book buyers to online sellers. In that environment, what a book is classified as can at times matter far more than it used to… to the reader, writer, publisher, OR library.

Finally, back in May I had the distinct (and new for me!) pleasure of serving as a keynote speaker at a symposium hosted by the University of Calgary, “Integrating Library, Archives and Special Collections into Creative Writing Pedagogy: An Experiential Symposium.” It was an honor and super-invigorating to present and help plan with the organizers and my fellow keynoter, David Pavelich. This event was some years in the making and had to be shifted online due to the pandemic, which put a damper on some facets and allowed for new ones, including broader attendance. None of it could have happened without the indefatigable efforts of my Canadian colleagues, Melanie Boyd, Aritha van Herk, and Jason Nisenson. Lots of great “whenworldscollide” moments here, but I have to say that it was a particular delight to talk about the research practices of various folks in horror and weird fiction.

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Adieu, Weird Fiction Publishers List

Photo by Pia on Pexels.com

Starting in 2015 I maintained a list of publishers of weird fiction, literary horror, or mainstream fiction that occasionally handled either. That list stayed current for a few years, but updates gradually became less frequent, and it became ever more out of date. Many people have used it over the years, but my interest in refreshing it has gone. If you’d like to save the links I had posted for your own purposes, there’s a copy over on the Wayback Machine.

These days, seems like more people get their market info from social, or from those folks who do regular submission roundups, like Eric J. Guignard or Gwendolyn Kiste. Likewise, check out Ralan.com, lists from writer’s organizations (SFWA, AWP, etc.), The Grinder, etc. Cheers!

Strange Love

Presumably most true Aickman-o-philes have seen this documentary already, but if you are one of his readers who have not, then enjoy.

I watched this tonight and enjoyed it, though I feel the film is probably most intelligible to those who are already deeply enough engaged with the dark and fantastic that Robert Aickman is not an unknown quantity. He is, in the U.S., at least, somewhere between an influential mid-century author of horror fiction and a cult author with a beyond-cult following. His work is refined and unusual, not well imitated, though some have walked in his footsteps. If you wind up in a conversation where people are talking about “strange stories,” Aickman is watching from a corner of the room.

Much about the documentary struck me, particularly the section discussing his personality: the “grit in the oyster” comment. So often excellent authors (or artists generally) are at heart awkward, rude, mean, or actually monsters. That tends to be less visible today, or perhaps such authors don’t have as easy a time of it, but it still astonishes me how much hue and cry a writer’s misstep engenders in “the writing community,” despite the vast, well-documented literature of creative people being sometimes outrageously disruptive and unpleasant. Aickman seems to have been on the benign end of that scale, but I don’t think he would fare well if he were around and trying to get started these days. His politics wouldn’t suit a lot of readers, and his manner suggests that he would be a disaster on, say, Facebook.

This film is a nice look at an author who lived in the days before Google, BookScan, the Wayback Machine, and constant surveillance and sousveillance. He was probably the happier for it, and perhaps a more interesting—and more enigmatic—figure than he would otherwise be today. Fortunately for his readers.

The Sample Copies of Yesteryear

Let me tell you of the days of print magazines!

For those of you who don’t publish or aspire to publish your writing, part of the process often involves familiarizing yourself with magazines. Back in the print-only days, that meant ordering sample copies from a publisher, or subscribing, or (increasingly rarely as newsstands waned) going somewhere to purchase a copy in person. These days even print-only magazines often have samples of their fiction online, partly to lure would-be readers, partly to give writers an idea of what (not) to submit. This summer I was doing some cleaning and was reminded that over the years, I’ve amassed a small horde of sample copies. What you see here is a tiny fraction of it, as I have piles elsewhere of magazines I subscribed to or bought an issue or two of, including Cemetery Dance, F&SF, Grue, Deathrealm, Weird Tales, etc..

A pleasant surprise was seeing names that are familiar to me today from tables of contents, social media, conventions, and other parts of the publishing world: Allen, Cisco, Kilpatrick, Pugmire, Schwader, Schweitzer, Thomas, and many more. Some of those authors are still publishing in magazines, big and small. Some write full time, some part time. Some have had a lasting impact on readers and writers who came after them and, in some cases, followed their models.

A squamous menagerie…

I’d like to think the continued presence of these authors in the field says something about continuity, and about what makes a writer a writer (writing, yes, but publication, too). Once upon a time I bought into the idea of a standard template for authors’ literary lives, and up until a few years ago I was still thinking in those terms. The disruptions caused by publisher consolidation, e-books, etc., has changed that for me, but also taking a long, hard look at the market, and realizing that the Big 5 currently have only a sliver of a sliver of a niche for dark fiction, and it’s parceled out across the bookstores. (I’m skipping over YA and graphic novels, which are different kettles of fish, and neither of which I really write.) Instead, there are—as there were hundreds of years ago—various means for making your work public. The familiar names that I see belong to people who learned that lesson and published consistently wherever there was room, or who found a way to make room for themselves.

Less happily, the names I didn’t recognize in these magazines are as disproportionately female as those I do recognize are male. What happened to them? Hard to say, given how many writers publish a story or two and then vanish, and I don’t know every corner of the field, but many of the TOCs I saw do clearly uphold the idea of horror as a boys’ club (awareness of which has led to various attempts at correction), and there is a host of reasons why women historically have published less often than men. Personally I love the broadening of the field in recent years. Long ago I was reading Brite, Jackson, Rice, etc., and in the last decade authors like Carter, Kiernan, Link, Llewellyn, etc. The writer just starting out today who looks back in twenty years will have a new group of authors  to consider foundational, and I think it probably goes without saying, but that group will look different in more ways than one.

A Friday Miscellany

• This will be my last rambling, bloggy post about “writing activity.” Two years ago I wrote a lengthy piece about stagnation in my writing, and since then I’ve thoroughly unstagnated. From regular productivity to setting goals to having projects lined up for at least the next six months, it would appear that writerly ennui is a luxury I can happily no longer afford, at least at such length.
• I have fiction forthcoming in multiple venues, one of which is the reborn Weirdbook. When I first got serious about writing many years ago, I would blog, or later Facebook, every bit of writing news (“I got a rejection with feedback!” “My story is being held for consideration!” etc.). This seems like a reasonable time to stop doing so much of that, not least to improve the signal:noise ratio.
• I have essays and critical non-fiction about horror or the Weird either forthcoming or with proposals accepted in multiple venues. One will be in a new non-fiction journal, Thinking Horror, and others will, all things going as planned, appear in 2017 publications. I also have various conference papers lined up  for 2016, so we’ll see how that goes.
• The tide of readers and critics of the Weird, literary/cosmic horror, etc. is rising. I’ll  have more to say about that elsewhere at some point, I expect, but I come across roughly one interesting new (to me or otherwise) blogger, essay, review, etc. in this vein per week. This week I’ve encountered two: Celluloid Wicker Man and ClaireQuip Books.
• The short story collection manuscript is one, or perhaps two, stories away from complete in rough. It’s lengthened and shortened a couple times now, but at this point it really does feel something like closing in on “done.” Various bits of polishing and editing remain, but my goal of finishing and submitting the ms before year’s end seems reasonable, if the rest of life cooperates.
• One of the unanticipated side-effects of creating the list of weird fiction publishers is that not a few publishers have been offering or sending me free fiction, journals, etc. As a slow reader, I’ve been eyeing my TBR pile, thinking about ethics in reviewing, etc. The answer will probably be a generic disclaimer somewhere on this site to the effect that I’m a bastion of unbiased something or other.
• Last weekend was Necronomicon 2015 in Providence, and not attending was one of the dark spots of the year, but I’ve been fortunate enough to attend  various literary conferences and conventions of late, learning a great deal in the process. I’ve come to realize that the people who attend the event make the event, but that most of us live in a world that doesn’t allow for infinite travel, and that many things make a literary community.
• Finally, I’ve been enjoying horror shorts lately. As with shorts generally, they vary in quality, but the length allows for a broad range of tasting. He Took His Skin Off For Me is a grotesque that I enjoyed very much, describing it elsewhere as maybe, kind of, what you’d get if Raymond Carver and Kelly Link had collaborated to write Hellraiser: