A collaborative project based on my poem "Touched," about my first and only meeting with my maternal grandfather, has been published in Soundzine! This poem tells how I entered the world just as my Irish grandfather was dying of cancer. We were in the same hospital, and the nurse brought me down to meet him as soon as I was born. He went into a coma that night and passed on three days later.

I am excited to be participating in the Clarion West Write-a-thon!

Clarion West is a speculative fiction workshop held annually in Seattle. Since 1971, Clarion West has offered support and education to writers of science fiction, fantasy, horror, magic realism, and slipstream literature. The Write-a-thon is a way for writers to participate remotely while also raising money for the workshop. This is my first year participating in the Write-a-thon, and I have set some hefty goals for myself: to kickstart my epic fantasy novel, launch my author website, and raise $2,000!

Click here to read the prologue for my fantasy novel, check out my profile, and donate.

On June 7, I had the honor of being a guest reader for Shannon Cain's performance art project, Tucson, The Novel: An Experiment in Literature and Civil Discourse. Ms. Cain, whose prize-winning short story collection is forthcoming from University of Pittsburgh Press, is serializing her novel-in-progress in three-minute segments during Tucson City Council meetings' public comment periods. It was a very interesting experience to participate in this project. I will soon provide a full commentary, but in the meantime, here is a link to the Channel 12 coverage. Fast forward to minute marker 62:35 to see my reading. Here is the bootleg version:

I had a great time visiting Wisconsin to participate in the Stoneboat reading in late April. The release party was held at Paradigm Coffee & Music, a funky cafe in downtown Sheboygan. I arrived shortly after a cold snap that culminated in a thundersnow. (That's thunder, lightning, and snow, all at once. Good times.) I missed all that, though, and enjoyed a convivial evening in the company of fellow artists, with only a slight chill in the night air. Here is a video of the reading:

My prose poem “Humberto, I Just Saw the News” is featured alongside many fantastic poems, short prose pieces, and visual artworks in the spring issue of Stoneboat, a Wisconsin-based literary journal. I had the opportunity to read in Sheboygan to help celebrate the new issue, which I will share more about soon. For now, here is the text of my poem. If you enjoy it and would like to purchase a copy or a subscription to Stoneboat, please visit their website.

If you want to get started in creative writing or you're looking for a workshop to support your established writing practice, you might enjoy The Writers Studio's upcoming classes.

Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Schultz founded The Writers Studio in New York more than twenty years ago, and Eleanor Kedney founded the studio's Tucson branch in 2005.  Although I have not taken a Writers Studio Class, I attended a local reading the studio hosted about a year ago at which Schultz shared his poetry. I left feeling impressed with the warm atmosphere the group created, not to mention the talent on display.

Monday, January 17, is the first day of Carli Brosseau's ten-week workshop. Brosseau is a brilliant writer and editor whom I know through the Editorial Freelancers Association. I highly recommend taking her class. Kedney's ten-week workshop starts January 20. Although I don't know Kedney personally, her credentials are their own recommendation. 

Warning: Contains Spoilers

I've had time now to watch Inception twice and digest the experience. I think it is a great movie, but what makes it great is everything but its fuzzy ending. I will endeavor not to write too much about the ending, except to iterate how much more satisfied I would have been if the damn top had just fallen, allowing the movie to decisively avoid the single biggest cliche in all of speculative fiction, namely, it was all a dream.

I appreciated this movie on many different levels. Although it is most definitely a heist flick preoccupied with everyone timing the job perfectly to get the big score, and although it was also a postmodern epic, I actually cared about the central characters. At least one review I read seems sure that "we," the viewers, can't connect to Inception's characters, but I have to disagree. This viewer could and did. I was surprised, actually, at how much I came to care about Cobb and Robert Fischer. My disappointment with the ending actually stems from the degree to which I cared about Cobb. I wanted him to have his reward, and I wanted the film to trust itself enough to avoid the cliche intellectual ending and go for the ending that would fulfill a main character who has suffered emotionally throughout the film. 

Overall, this was a highly enjoyable book, worthy of the many awards it's won and appealing to a much wider range of readers than the young adult. I particularly enjoyed the opening and use of setting. Gaiman turns the home into a graveyard and the graveyard into a home. Bod's graveyard is rich and varied, complete with not only the expected tombs, but ancient burial tunnels, portals to the underworld, and unhallowed ground. The nooks and crannies of Bod's home contained fascinating psychological resonances for the child character. Having grown up blocks away from a graveyard myself, I have always felt a special fondness for the peace and spaciousness of that setting. It was exciting to spend a whole book in a world created by someone who clearly felt a similar affinity.

A brilliant touch was the use of the inscriptions on a ghost's tombstone to identify and characterize her. It's part of the way Bod must keep it all straight, living in a neighborhood where people range in age many hundreds of years. As a speculative element, the idea that the words your loved ones leave to memorialize you become your calling card in the afterlife struck me as highly creative.

I am pleased to announce that Cold Flashes: Literary Snapshots of Alaska, edited by Michael Engelhard (University of Alaska Press) has been released! This anthology contains flash fiction and short nonfiction pieces set in the Land of the Midnight Sun. Among them is my flash fiction story "Turnagain," posted below.

This lovely collection also features black-and-white photographs enhancing the mood cast by the tight, powerful prose. Digital and e-book versions are available. For more information and to purchase, please visit: http://www.uaf.edu/uapress/browse/detail/index.xml?id=401 

Yeah, I know, Avatar Week on my blog was in early January, but I have more to say, so I hope you'll indulge me, imagining, if it helps, that we live on Venus, where a week is 819 days. With Avatar scheduled for theatrical re-release this August, the film remains near the surface of American cultural consciousness, due to resurface again, as soon as everyone has absorbed the new Twilight movie.

In my first post on Avatar, I argued that a great part of the movie's popularity stems from its cultural relevance, specifically to American cultural mythos. I'd like to expand on this and focus on two opposing forces that make this a highly unsettled text, able to engage and enrage viewers on all sides of the political spectrum. Those two opposing forces are an overt challenge to colonialism/imperialism and the going native trope.

Many viewers have made the leap between the Na'vi and Native Americans. It is always shifty ground to analyze a speculative text in terms of allegory; Tolkien, for example, famously decried any claims that Lord of the Rings contains direct allegory. (The Ring of Power does not equal the atom bomb, however many parallels it may share with that piece of war machinery.) Although I am sensitive to this issue, I too made the leap between Na'vi and a Hollywood representation of Native Americans, as I believe Cameron wanted his American viewers to do.