Happy October, the best month of the year! Have a ghost story to celebrate– “The Ghostberry Bush” is in this month’s Enchanted Conversation, The Thirteenth Hour.
It is a version of the The Juniper Tree, or the Aarne Thompson tale type 720, or “my mother slew me; my father ate me.” Good times.
I love DIY culture, and owe much of my life to its ethos. For years I have supported artists I admire on Patreon, which embodies the ethos but is even better as it creates community around creators. 
It’s a website that lets you support artists and writers and in exchange you get an exclusive look at their work before it goes out into the world. I have been building my Patreon page for a while and finally decided to launch it today, at the May full moon. I will be adding weekly updates about my creative process as well as monthly poems, short fiction or non fiction pieces inspired by folklore, witchcraft and the wild landscape. I hope you will join me on this journey.
I’m delighted that a poem of mine will be included in the Monster Verse, Poems Human and Inhuman anthology, to be published by Random House on September 15th, 2015. The anthology is edited by Tony Barnstone and Michelle Mitchell-Foust.
About the anthology, from the Random House website:
Humans have always defined themselves by imagining the inhuman; the gloriously gruesome monsters that enliven our literary legacy haunt us by reflecting our own darkest possibilities. The poems gathered here range in focus from extreme examples of human monstrousness—murderers, cannibals, despotic Byzantine empresses—to the creatures of myth and nightmare: dragons, sea serpents, mermaids, gorgons, sirens, witches, and all sorts of winged, fanged, and fire-breathing grotesques. The ghastly parade includes Beowulf’s Grendel, Homer’s Circe, William Morris’s Fafnir, Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwock, Robert Lowell’s man-eating mermaid, Oriana Ivy’s Baba Yaga, Thom Gunn’s take on Jeffrey Dahmer, and Shakespeare’s hybrid creature Caliban, of whom Prospero famously concedes, “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
Monster Verse is both a delightful carnival of literary horror and an entertainingly provocative investigation of what it means to be human.
The York Minster. Taken with my iphone using Snapseed editing.
This year Fantasycon was in York, convenient for me as I live behind the rail station so the con was essentially in my back yard. The popular joke at the con was that York was indeed Winterfell. I confess I went simply because it was close to me– but fantasy is the genre I have always loved and with the embrace of the New Weird, it has become even closer to my heart.
The first con I ever attended was GenCon back in 1984. I was a dorky kid who played D&D. I remember trying to disguise my budding womanhood by wearing a man’s shirt and a fedora. I ended up wandering around pretty lonely, not knowing how how to approach the myriad boys and men around me. (I don’t remember any other girls, though there must have been some.) I was shy then, and not much has changed though I no longer wear men’s shirts and fedoras– maybe I should.
I still found the social aspect of this recent con daunting. Everyone was chatting in groups– presumably they’d known each other for years, or so it seemed. There was no way to enter into conversations as a lone woman. Or at least i should say I found it daunting.
And yet, things have changed. This was my first Fantasycon– since moving to the UK I have regularly attended Eastercon, the BSFA con– and in the last few years I have sold my hand made jewellery in the dealers room under the Feral Strumpet banner, which has helped me fund my trip to the con.
What I noticed was that feminism was alive and well in almost all the panels I attended. Challenging questions of inclusion and the purpose of violence against women in fiction where electric, bristling with new ideas. Men and women were voicing complex arguments; inclusion and nixing the misogynist cliches in the genre simply makes for richer stories.
Still the statistics are sobering– 50% of fantasy readers are women, yet we make up only 25% of published fantasy writers. These numbers, voiced by Abbadon Editor David Moore in his panel on Grimdark, were repeated in other panels I attended that weekend. There was an urgency to change this, something I had not felt before at any con.
It gave me hope. I would like to go back in time to that little girl hiding in plain sight and say “Hang in there– 30 years from now things will start changing and when they do, it’s going to happen fast.”
