SF Zine Fest book haul

Winner! I am pleased to announce that Skylar L. is the winner of The Walls Around Us giveaway! I’ll be sending out your copy this week.

On Sunday, I journeyed up to the city to check out the SF Zine Fest. It was a free event that housed two rooms packed full of independent and small press makers and creators of zines, chapbooks, art, and comics. It’s a very cool event (although there were so many people it was almost overwhelming) and I grabbed lots of goodies (spending more money than I probably should have).

SF Zine Fest 2015`

I was also happy to be there to support friend and amazing human being, Allie Marini, who has two new chapbooks out from Nomadic Press. While at the Nomadic booth, checking out all the 2015 poetry chapbooks on the table, each with its own gorgeous cover, I couldn’t help but swipe up the entire lot.

Cliffdiving and And When She Tasted of Knowledge by Allie Marini
On Sunday, A Finch by Cassandra Dallett
A Heart with No Scars by Brennan “B Deep” DeFrisco
Collective Regeneration and Universal Love by Dan Shurley
Nueva Cuenta by Freddy Gutierrez
We Shoot Typewriters by Paul Corman-Roberts

Other poetry chapbooks I picked up in my meandering included Caffeinated Fairy Tales by Heather Boyd and Milk & Servitude by Noelle Zappia.

Among the art and comics, I picked up were:

Raising Dion, written by Dennis Liu and illustrated by Jason Piperberg, which I grabbed because it tells a superhero story from the point of view of the mother trying to raise her powerful son to be a hero.
The Gecko and the Tree Grave Robbers (as well as some awesome notecards) by Cheez Hayama
Mythology Anthology by the Nijimafia, a group of artists including Adual, Akaibelier, Elaine Nguyen, Giselle Sarmiento, Madeline Zuluaga, Stephanie Hueden

I also learned about an documentary in progress called Secret Identities, directed by Mike Phillips. The doc is about GLBT fans and creators in the comic book community. The aim is to give voice to under represented groups, which is very cool.

What I’m Reading

Plowed through Volumes 18-20 of Fables by Bill Willingham. Oh, the terrible things that happen to my beloved characters. I am almost afraid to read the final two volumes because I know more terrible things will happen.

My next read is Divine Scream by Benjamin Kane Ethridge, which is a dark YA fantasy novel about a boy and a banshee. Can’t wait.

What I’m Writing

I’ve started putting together what I think will be a chapbook of prose poems based on the Twelve Dancing Princesses fairy tale — which is partially inspired by recent projects I’ve read by Jessie Carty (Shopping After the Apocalypse, soon to be published) and Kristen Marie Darling (Failure Lyric) — both are fantastic. One poem is completed and two more are getting close to completion. I have the rest of poems loosely planned out.

Due to my new Twelve Dancing Princesses project, I did not get around to looking at and reconsidering Sincerely Yours, my chapbook which is currently out on submission. It’s been rejected twice already and I’m waiting to hear from two more publishers. However, I have two poems that I could consider writing and adding to the collection, and may remove or reorder some of the other poems

In other writing news, I was contacted by Clare MacQueen at KYSO Flash, who has requested to reprint “The Things I Own” — wow! What an honor and it’s a really cool market.

Goal(s) for this week: Finish two more poems in Twelve Dancing Princesses chapbook. Put together additional poems for KYSO Flash.

Linky Goodness

  • Zachary Wood writs on Cultivating Empathy and Open Mindedness — “To begin with, I think reading about the struggles of others helps us cultivate empathy. No matter what our experiences are, we can glimpse the challenges and crises our world faces every day on the news. Great literature offers us far more than can be captured in soundbites, news clips, and advertisements. Great literature gives us a platform from which we can explore all of what we see on the news in more depth.”
  • Michelle G. writes about empiricism, testing, and how differences in performance tends to be perceived as related to differences in math ability  — “It is true that men score higher on spatial reasoning tests, though you might have caught on that there’s a little bit more to this picture (why would a female MIT student publicize stereotypes that actively work against her?). If you’re now wondering whether I’m about to throw some kind of feminist rant at you, I’ll give you a “well, sort of,” because calling out factual misconception is just as important as promoting feminist ideals here, and because I think those two go hand in hand anyway. I’ll largely put the romance of egalitarianism aside, though, to talk about empiricism.”