Sunday, May 24, 2020

Planets, Poetry, and the Solitary Wanderer: A Guest Post by Albert Wendland


Good morning, friends and stargazers--

Today in the Madhouse, I'm honored to host Dr. Albert Wendland, who I had the pleasure of studying with at Seton Hill University both for my undergraduate and graduate degree. When I was first starting out in college, Dr. Wendland's classes truly helped shape me as a writer, and taking some of his literature classes--whether they were centered around British Lit or theoretical approaches to the sublime--helped teach me about art and philosophy in a way that I had never been exposed to. 

Later on during my graduate work, I studied science fiction with him for a little bit, and in addition to turning me on to classic works like Frank Herbert's Dune, he's also responsible for assigning me my first ever graphic novel (Planetary), which opened up a whole new world to me, and I'm happy to say that I'm an avid comic book/graphic novel reader now, largely due to him.

As such, t's a true pleasure for me to have him here on my blog today where we're discussing his upcoming poetry collection, Temporary Planets for Transitory Days. If you'd like to read the formal announcement of this book deal, you can click here, and as always, you can follow Raw Dog Screaming Press for more updates and announcements surrounding its production. 

Until then, sit back, relax, and get lost in the stars.

Best,
Stephanie M. Wytovich 


Planets, Poetry, and the Solitary Wanderer
By Albert Wendland

The protagonist of my two science-fiction novels, The Man Who Loved Alien Landscapes and In a Suspect Universe, is an interstellar explorer/adventurer living in a galaxy where travel between the stars has become common. He’s a solitary person, and one of the challenges I had writing about him is that he is so private he seldom reveals himself.

How do you talk about your character when he doesn’t want to talk much to others, or to you?

(Or, as the fictional editor of my current book laments, “Mykol Ranglen, who are you?”)

Yet Mykol Ranglen has deep feelings, and deeper longings. His relationships with people are intense though often fragmentary—as if he runs away before “letting anyone in” (at least that’s what one of his ex-lovers said about him). Unsure and overly careful, often paranoid, he escapes from people to other planets, where he can explore and be on his own and experience different forms of life and behavior. After staying for a while on his home world of Annulus (a large circular habitat in space), he either leaves for a private retreat inside an asteroid, or travels outward into unknown spaces, eager for the new, the peculiar, the sublime.

He really is a “man who loves alien landscapes.”

But he’s also a writer.  And besides his essays and travelogues he often writes poetry. He has a reputation as a recognized poet, but his shared writings are never revealing of his private life. Yet, however, he does keep one ragged notebook of private jottings that he keeps to himself (it was introduced, and at times quoted, in the second novel, In a Suspect Universe). And, while I was writing that novel, I cherished the idea of also writing and publishing that notebook—a collection of his private poems, the ones he doesn’t share, the ones in which he reveals (if in devious and not always forthright ways) his feelings, his experiences, his reactions, his thoughts, and especially his longings.

This notion captivated me when I thought of it. I gathered all the poems I ever wrote and I then edited, elaborated, and doctored them for Ranglen’s exclusive voice. Then I wrote a whole host of original works, more than half the book, on subjects I imagined Ranglen pondering and that I often toyed with myself but normally would not have composed (like a long celebration of spaceports—one of my favorites). Then more poems and titles came—“Litanies of Worlds,” “The Universe In a Frame,” “The Secrets of Earth,” “A World Called Little Redemption,” “Crashing Suns,” “Conversation in a Darkened Spaceship.” I was on a roll!

Some poems would be frank personal revelations:

            Now you are lost,
Found and gone,
To return in only
The small dreams of night . . .

Others would hint of planetary, galactic, or near-mythic pasts:

In the old Dreamtime,
When the world was unformed,
The Sky Heroes walked
The fluid first lands . . .

Some would give clues to Ranglen’s more secret and ongoing tales: 

Though other stories end,
Your “Deep Story” thrives,
A suspended revelation
Told in Galaxy Time . . .

Others would elaborate specific incidents from his past, about the people and places that haunt him:

Last night I dreamt of the Spiral Palms,
And the joy and wonder of that lost time
Welled up inside me like an ocean at night . . .

Some would describe the wonders he’s seen during his many travels in space:

. . . chalcedony or lapis worlds,
Jupiters like agates, jaspers like Mars,
The snowflake obsidian of Pluto’s surface . . .

And all of them would show his dreams and his hopes, his many fears, and especially the ache of his persistent yearning,

The secret of identity
That to our window night brings:
Our longing is blind,
But our longing has wings.

So, I hope you can sense the pleasure I felt in writing this collection, and the fine sense of accomplishment it brings. It helped me to respect the secrecy of my main character, and yet, at the same time, it allowed me to get into his soul—to let him have his say, and yet to do it through his own poetic and personal means, to hear him describe what he apparently lives for most:
            
            Sites passed,
            Travelers’ ways,
            Temporary planets for transitory days.

(The book can be pre-ordered here, and all early orders get a special gift insert linking a poem with an incident in one of the earlier novels.)

Bio: Albert Wendland has made a career out of his life-long interests in science fiction—and photography, art, film, and travel. He teaches popular fiction, literature, and writing at Seton Hill University, where he has been director of its MFA in Writing Popular Fiction (the program famous for its exclusive attention to genre writing). His SF novel, The Man Who Loved Alien Landscapes, was a starred pick-of-the-week by Publisher’s Weekly, and the prequel, In a Suspect Universe, was published in 2018, describing a story from the protagonist’s past. He’s also written and published a book-length study of science fiction, a chapter in Many Genres, One Craft, a poem in Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books, and several articles on SF and writing. He enjoys landscape photography, astronomy, graphic novels, and the “sublime.”

Monday, May 18, 2020

WRITING FROM MY BUBBLE: A Guest Post from Lee Murray


Hello friends and fiends, 

Today in the Madhouse, I'm sitting down and chatting with one of the most lovely people I've met to date: Lee Murray. Lee is a fellow horror writer and RDSP author, and every time I've had the pleasure to be in her company, I find myself forever smiling and simply being in a state of awe because of her talent, strength, and warmth. As such, I wanted to reach out to her today--from Pittsburgh, PA to New Zealand--to see how she was doing and to chat about how her writing habits and her relationship to art has changed due to the state of the world. 

As always, Lee met my request with light, love, honesty, and grace, and I hope you find her essay as touching as I did. 

Be safe, take care, and we'll speak more soon.
Stephanie M. Wytovich


Writing From My Bubble
by Lee Murray

In Aotearoa-New Zealand, we called them bubbles: closed households of two or three people with whom you would protect the vulnerable and see out the apocalypse. Because my husband had just returned from a business trip to the US, three Murrays went into lock-down on 17 March, getting our supermarket stock-up done before the rest of the country followed suit a little over a week later.

in lockdown
a fantail flits
outside

civilians
fired upon at the border
toilet paper wars

In those first weeks, social isolation felt like business as usual, since my husband and I both work from home anyway. We didn’t need to rush-order new desks, rearrange workspace in a spare room, or commandeer a corner of the kitchen table. No need to order in another reem of paper. Our home internet is 900MBits/sec. We were all set. We simply switched our pre-breakfast gym workouts for longer walks around the neighbourhood with the dog, jumping up on banks or onto dewy grass verges to keep a suitable social distance from any others out walking. Most neighbourhoods have a local bush trail within handy reach, and in a town like Tauranga, there are never too many people on the trails. In the lockdown, the streets and tracks were almost deserted. Birds chattered. Lawn mowers hummed.
a creek
meandering
through autumn

We certainly weren’t minimising the threat of the pandemic—New Zealand’s numbers were on the upswing with 256 cases recorded on the day the lockdown went into place. The economic fall-out would be brutal, but the lives of New Zealand’s vulnerable were at stake. There was comfort in knowing that our precious family members were safe in their respective bubbles. Our government had a plan. Go early and go hard. We hunkered down and got on with the task of flattening the curve, checking in daily for live updates from Jacinda and Dr Ashley, who provided Kiwis with their daily report card. Strangely, in those early days, my anxious-Piglet self was almost upbeat. We could do this. We simply had to stay the course.
rising story arc
I’m wondering
how it ends
But it’s like Steinbeck said, isn’t it?

“It is not good to want a thing too much. It sometimes drives the luck away. You must want it just enough, and you must be very tactful with Gods or the gods.” ― John Steinbeck, The Pearl

I wanted too much. Perhaps my hubris had angered Whiro-te-tipua, the lord of darkness, because on May 29, New Zealand recorded its first death. We had known it would come, and yet inside our bubbles, we were stunned.
a city
plague-kissed
—and quiet

Days passed and more people died. TV became both torture and distraction. Two billion others watched on, everyone, everywhere consuming stories. Our vocabulary expanded to include words like co-morbidity, immune compromised, and hydroxychloroquine. Acronyms like R95, ICU, and PPE. We studied graphs, Ro ratios, and percentages. We mastered Zoom, Teams, and Facetime.

under siege
the battle raging
my dog snores

Too numb to write fiction, I resolved to be productive in other ways; my speaking events and conventions had been cancelled, so I took on new mentees, read books, wrote blurbs, signed up for a course, and produced some webinars. Still, I couldn’t write. Nothing solid. Nothing that worked. Nothing that would stick. There was only the weekly social media poetry-date with my friend in Wisconsin, where, for the past year, we have shared our observations and reflections as haiku/senryu. These tiny poems of less than seventeen syllables have become the backbone of my pandemic record.
camelias
social distancing

On 4 April, my mother got a call from the rest home, and for the next week I was immune to the pandemic.
my father
dying
the world stills

New Zealand’s compassionate policy during Level 4 lockdown was for one family member visitor per dying non-Covid patient. In strict quarantine. In full PPE. For a week, my mother, my sister, and I did turn about. My brothers, living in other towns, were not so lucky. I read Dad the poems he’d read to me when I was little. The Wreck of the Hesperus. Jabberwock. Even giggled over some Pam Ayres. I read him a couple of poems of my own, including the one about our midnight trips to catch eel at Pukehina creek. He died gently, in his own time. I joked that he could at least tell me where he’d buried the family treasure before he went. Nothing doing. Dad raised his eyebrows in a classic Kiwi East Coast wave.

When I wasn’t with him, I wrote daily updates for the family, doing my best to smooth the edges of words like night and death.
eggshells, hearts, and other fragilities

letterbox
tiny wings struggle
in a web

Nor was I with Dad when he died on 9 April. On 10 April, I woke up early. Or perhaps I’d barely slept. I pulled the curtains open and watched a milky sunrise.

dawn
grey upon grey
a heron in flight

But I was lucky because Mum joined my family bubble. I got to hug her, at least. For two days, we sat in the sun, drank tea, and took phone calls from friends and family. We told stories of Dad. There was nothing for us to plan; Level 4 health regulations meant all bodies had to be cremated. There were no funerals. No flowers. No family groups. No exceptions. Cart me off in a cardboard box, Dad always said.
in the rushes
a reed bends
unseen

The pandemic raged on. While Mum knitted me a jersey, I went back to work, a short commute when you’re a full-time writer working from home. Over the next few weeks, I replied to mentees, judged an award, edited a national children’s anthology, rescheduled some local writing meet-ups, and critiqued some work for colleagues. I read another book. I won an award which would have made Dad proud; we celebrated with a cup of tea. In the evenings, we turned off the news and watched the Endeavour series from start to finish. I cuddled the dog, my son, my darling, my mum. Still the only writing was the poems. A few words scribbled on scraps of paper. Like breathing in tiny shallow breaths. Stabs of acute pain, while I wait for the panic attack to pass. I imagine those same feelings are playing out in ICUs everywhere.

On April 28, New Zealand loosened its lockdown restrictions, moving into Alert Level 3 in a cautious contactless reopening; Mum went home to sleep in her own bed and, I suspect, to start her grieving.

We’re not special, and I’m not complaining. Yes, it’s hard to lose a parent in a global pandemic. Yes, it’s hard to be far from the people you desperately need to hug in times like these. But it was the right thing to do. Here in New Zealand, our numbers have been promising—just 2 new cases in the past week, with 96% of all cases recovered. Things could have been so much worse; they might still be.

a shoulder
draped with privilege
her back freezes

On 13 May, New Zealand moved to Alert Level 2, which allows for up to ten people to meet with distancing and contact tracing records. Our precious bubbles are popping, and it scares me. But I saw my brother and his family yesterday. We had a family lunch. Sushi. Pasta. It felt almost normal. Today, my daughter and her partner flew home.

I’m not sure when I’ll be able to write again. For now, it seems the world is changing too fast. Anxious-Piglet-sorts don’t cope well with change. I’ll try again tomorrow.

the pestilence followed us
into space
rampaging
rampant
in ragged, haggard lungs
We ejected the dead,
sent them gentle into the night.
Imagined the starry fireworks
glimpsed on far-off porches.
We saw only darkness.
Bereft, we drifted on.

Lee Murray is a multi-award-winning writer and editor of science fiction, fantasy, and horror (Sir Julius Vogel, Australian Shadows) and a three-time Bram Stoker Award® nominee. Her works include the Taine McKenna military thrillers (Severed Press), and supernatural crime-noir series The Path of Ra, co-written with Dan Rabarts (Raw Dog Screaming Press), as well as several books for children. She is proud to have edited thirteen speculative works, including award-winning titles Baby Teeth: Bite Sized Tales of Terror and At the Edge (with Dan Rabarts), Te Kōrero Ahi Kā (with Grace Bridges and Aaron Compton) and Hellhole: An Anthology of Subterranean Terror (Adrenaline Press). She is the co-founder of Young New Zealand Writers, an organisation providing development and publishing opportunities for New Zealand school students, co-founder of the Wright-Murray Residency for Speculative Fiction Writers, and HWA Mentor of the Year for 2019. In February 2020, Lee was made an Honorary Literary Fellow in the New Zealand Society of Authors Waitangi Day Honours. Lee lives over the hill from Hobbiton in New Zealand’s sunny Bay of Plenty where she dreams up stories from her office overlooking a cow paddock. Read more at www.leemurray.info   

Wednesday, May 13, 2020

So, You’re Trapped at Home with Your Demons: A Guest Post by Donna Lynch


Good morning, friends and fiends:

I don't know about you all, but the state of the world has me in a serious funk lately. Time has last all meaning, my writing is disjointed and all over the place, I think I've gone through all of Netflix, and when I'm not having nightmares, I'm dealing with some pretty serious bouts of insomnia again. However, in a time when we're all probably spending way too much time in our heads, I think now it's more important than ever to open a dialogue up and talk about mental health. As such, I invited one of my all-time favorite writers to stop by the Madhouse today, to chat about how writing can help soothe and heal in a time of turmoil.

Donna Lynch is a dark fiction writer, poet, and the co-founder—along with her husband, artist and musician Steven Archer—of the dark electro-rock band Ego Likeness (Metropolis Records). Her written works include Isabel Burning, Driving Through the Desert, Ladies & Other Vicious CreaturesDaughters of LilithIn My Mouth, Witches, and Choking Back the Devil.

Now Donna and I first met at a Raw Dog Screaming Press event around seven(ish) years ago, and while we have countless things in common, one of the things I love best about her is how beautifully honest and authentic she is. Right off the bat, I knew that she was someone I could laugh with, joke around with, cry with, all while having really serious conversations about life and how fucked up it can get. Over the years, we've written poetry alongside each other, and on some occasions even together, and she is someone who constantly inspires me and whose voice and poetry I often turn to when I need a dose of comfort in the dark. 

With that said, I invited her here today to talk a little bit about confronting our demons, something that she did masterfully in her Bram Stoker award-nominated collection, Choking Back the Devil--which I highly recommend reading if you haven't picked up a copy yet. 

Until next time!

Stay safe and be well, 
Stephanie M. Wytovich 

So, You’re Trapped at Home with Your Demons

Well, here we are. The event that many of us—the scientists and doctors, the horror lovers, the anxious, the nihilists, the Tank Girl and Mad Max fans—have always known was coming: PANDEMIC.

Most everyone has lost something at this point. Some losses, temporary or negligible, others irreparable and permanent. It’s neither wise nor helpful to compete in the Pain Olympics, but it’s important to remember how deep the chasms of loss can be. Let’s try to be honest with ourselves about how far we’ve fallen, and how much further down we could go.

While we wait to see what the virus and the future holds, we can hardly ignore the darkness with our walls. Our demons are always there, but now that they know we’re captive, they’re hungrier than ever. We used to have a cat that would catch mice, then put them in the bathtub, tormenting them before the kill. He knew they couldn’t get out.

It’s like that some days.

I recognize that not everyone is lying around on fainting couches, succumbing to ennui, while typhus rages in sewage-slicked streets. People are busy—many busier than before—but no amount of work can keep us from going to dark places, whether we’re alone, or not alone enough. We’re afraid of getting sick. We’re afraid of suffering and dying. We’re afraid for our loved ones. We’re worried about money, about resources, about our homes and businesses, our debts, our social lives and relationships. We are worried about everything, and there comes a point where our brains say: Enough! I’m going to go over here now and remember this shitty thing that happened years ago while we’re trying to fall asleep! Enjoy! And in the end, you really can’t win. The demons are inside and out.

So, what can we do?
I’ll share with you my daily isolation-plague-time regiment:
  • Wake up for the 19th time
  • Feed the cat
  • Take meds
  • Open my laptop
  • Watch Netflix until I can’t handle the open laptop’s judgmental glare anymore
  • Write a few lines
  • Light incense
  • Wash the dishes
  • Trauma memory/ dissociative episode
  • awww baby chipmunk right outside the window!
  • Write a few more lines
  • Get stuck on social media because someone is wrong on the internet          
  • BAD MOOD
  • Think about that time in 6th grade I lied about having a boyfriend and got called out and everyone laughed at me
  • Light more incense but this time chanting the names of lesser demons because, hey, the more the merrier
  • Tequila
  • Video chats with dumb filters
  • Bed, sort of


You can use mine as a template, but your mileage may vary.

Here’s the important part of the plan, though: Write down your demons. You don’t have to be good at it. Just write them out, write their names, describe their faces, what they’ve done—literally or shrouded in metaphor. There’s no way to be wrong, because it’s your story, it’s your language.

There are tons of other ways to cope with your demons in this unprecedented time of fear. Writing is just one, and it’s the one that works the best for me. You have to face them and if not now, when? The punchline is that they’re still going to be there when you go back into the world someday. They’ve been there the whole time.

The truth is, most of us don’t ever say goodbye to them. We just learn to coexist. Love the film or hate it, TheBabadook was one of the best modern metaphors for trauma and the reality of living with it. Chain that fucker up in the cellar and feed it just enough to keep it contented. Strive for attainable goals with those bastards, because they don’t like to leave. Face them, name them, and write it down, draw it, sing it, play it, weave it, plant it, sweat it, scream it out at the moon—it doesn’t matter how or what, just as long as you don’t run and hide. Don’t cower under your blankets or pretend that you’re fine when you know you’re not. Don’t be fine. Don’t be afraid of not being fine. Say you’re afraid when you’re afraid. We don’t have any control of what’s happening outside, but inside, it’s your party. You make the theme and write the guest list.

I can’t say that writing will heal you, but it certainly doesn’t hurt. And while being heard is helpful, what’s even better is being able to express your pain. I get to tell my story, whether it’s to all of you, or if it’s just to myself and a private audience of monsters. You get to tell your stories, too. And while you’re trapped inside with your demons, remember they’re trapped in there with you. So make them listen.

September Madhouse Recap: Mabon, Spooky Reads, and Fall Wellness

Hello friends and fiends– Thanks for reading Stephanie’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. We started S...