Five Ways
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From the current WIP

Picture of a tortoiseshell cat.(This is from the yet untitled steampunk-new weird-horror piece which I’m thinking will be the first week’s Writeathon story and which I also think may end up at novelette length.)

Doctor Larch has a pet crow named Jonah. He says he raised it from a chick, but I have trouble imagining Doctor Larch patiently nursing anything, feeding it mealworms or bits of meat or making sure it was warm or sheltered. If he has such a faculty for tenderness, he doesn’t exhibit it towards any of the patients.

Today he made an appearance to supervise Mr. Abernathy’s removal from his chair.

They should have realized Abernathy was never moving from it, but the orderlies probably welcomed not having to lift him back and forth. They left him in there till his flesh grew into the wicker, and today he screamed while they cut it away and Doctor Larch watched. He wears a pad on his shoulder for the crow to shit on, but it misses a great deal of the time, and the Doctor’s black coat is clotted with gray and white on its backside.

It’s hit or miss whether or not Abernathy will survive. I don’t know that he cares, either way. Before this, all he did was stare out his window, day and night, looking eastward, towards the mountains the white men call the Cascades.

There was thunder last night. Not natural thunder, but echoes from the battle being waged far out to sea and among the San Juan Islands. We’re close enough to those battlelines that many people have fled Seattle. Others have stuck it out, saying that the lines will shift again, in a different direction.

I have stayed. But where else would I go?

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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."

~K. Richardson

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Teaching and Burnout: Taking a Break

Photo of Cat Rambo, speculative fiction writer. All rights reserved.
What classes are coming up? There's Writing F&SF Stories, the First Pages workshop, Podcasting Basics, Literary Techniques for Genre Fiction...and more.
I’ve been teaching online classes for a few years now. They have been awesome and one of the coolest things has been the number of talented writers I’ve had the privilege to work with. However, I’m scheduling a break from teaching during the latter half of 2014, and it’s for a few reasons.

The first and most important is that I can feel a little burnout creeping up around the edges. I’ll be talking in a class and think to myself, “I know I’ve said this before,” and it will be because I have said it before, repeatedly even — but not to that class. I can tell that if I don’t take a break, that feeling is going to drown me.

The second is to focus even more on the writing, because there’s at least two books I’d like to finish up this year, along with the usual roster of short stories. (I’m at ten completed so far this year, which is unusually productive but highly pleasing.)

The third is because I don’t want to get in a rut. I want to go think about some new things and then come back ready to talk about them to students.

So – if you want a class with me in 2014 — check out the list now. I’ll probably list a couple more conversation classes in June, but that’s it. But I’ll be back in 2015!

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You Should Read This: Poetry As Insurgent Art by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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You must decide if bird cries are cries of ecstasy or cries of despair, by which you will know if you are a tragic or a lyric poet. -Lawrence Ferlinghetti
One of the distinctions that I sometimes hear people making is “regular” Sf and “literary” SF, usually with some baggage about the literary SF being art. I say, if you’re making something you don’t really interact with for food, shelter, or clothing (and even then, in some cases), you are probably making art.

Word-wrangling is art, no matter whether it is used for the lowest purposes or the most exalted, and the artist who relaxes and enjoys it learns to use artful techniques for the entertainment or edification of her/his readers. And they may, in that process, create something lasting.

At the same time, a dose of art in whatever form — visual, music, verbal — can shake things loose in our heads to the point where better and more interesting words fall out. This is why you should read books like Poetry as Insurgent Art.

Here’s Ferlinghetti himself on the notion of rejecting poetry, aka all that artsy stuff.

Don’t let them tell you poetry is bullshit.

Don’t let them tell you poetry is for the birds.

Have a good laugh at those who tell you poets are misfits or potential terrorists and a danger to the state.

Don’t let them tell you poetry is a neurosis that some people never outgrow.

Laugh at those who tell you poetry is all written by the Holy Ghost and you’re just a ghost-writer.

Don’t ever believe poetry is irrelevant in dark times.

If you’ve ever been inside Ciy Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, you’ve walked the same floorboards as Ferlinghetti, who co-founded the store with Peter Martin in 1953. He and Shig Murao, the manager, were arrested in 1956 on obscenity charges for selling copies of Allan Ginsberg’s Howl.

Why should you read this? I tell you what. I’ll let Ferlinghetti speak for himself by quoting the beginning of Poetry as Insurgent Art.

I am signaling you through the flames.

The North Pole is not where it used to be.

Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest.

Civilization self-destructs.

Nemesis is knocking at the door.

What are poets for, in such an age? What is the use of poetry?

The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it. (A voice in the wilderness!)

If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this means sounding apocalyptic.

You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American or a non-American, you can conquer the conquerers with words.

If you would be a poet, write living newspapers. Be a reporter from outer space, filing dispatches to some supreme managing editor who believes in full disclosure and has a low tolerance for bullshit.

Ferlinghetti should be read as a subversive act:

The idea of poetry as an arm of class war disturbs the sleep of those who do not wish to be disturbed in the pursuit of happiness.

The poet by definition is the bearer of Eros and love and freedom and thus the natural-born non-violent enemy of any police state.

Read this for the sake of poetry, “the last lighthouse in rising seas.”

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