Stephen M. Davis There is, of course, a story behind this essay, which didn’t start out as a look at Web poetry at all. In fact, the first idea I’d had was to look at speculative poetry in the print medium. What I discovered is that this is no easy task: most speculative poetry is originally printed in the Small (well, Teenie, if truth be told) Press, in magazines that occasionally have runs of 200 copies. I then decided to…
This updated essay, a comprehensive chronology, and a Q&A which Steve Hockensmith kindly did with me, represent the deepest dive anyone has done on the terrific Holmes on the Range series. It incorporates all the novels and short stories featuring Otto and Gustav Amlingmeyer, as well as the two novels and one short story for the spin-off Double-A Western Detective Agency. I just read the new novel, Strong Medicine, and it was great Big Red and Old Red fun, as…
This wasn’t my original plan for this guest post. The day before writing this, I was interviewed for the Functional Nerds podcast. During the interview, cohost Tracy Townsend brought up my recent Uncanny Magazine editorial where I said, “Nobody would call a yearly referendum about whether or not your business should exist a stress-free process.” Tracy wanted to know why I kept doing this if that’s the case. So, why the hell am I running another Uncanny Magazine Kickstarter?
One of the most fun, unique aspects of Goodman Games’ Tales from the Magician’s Skull was the blending of Sword & Sorcery with Dungeon Crawl Classics statistics for the stories. That’s a wonderful recipe that has not been reproduced, despite many super-cool S&S periodicals being available (Dark Moon Quarterly, Battleborn, New Edge S&S, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Swords and Sorcery Magazine, Savage Realms, Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy, etc. plus loads of anthologies). Well, this Dark Muse News post…
Bert Shurtleff was born on August 3, 1897 to Eugene Kassuth Shurtleff and Hattie Elma (née Cook) in Adamsville, Rhode Island. He was the seventh of ten children. When he was fourteen, he left home to try to support himself, returning to school when he was 18 and attending East Greenwich Academy for High School. During World War I, he enlisted in the U.S. Naval Reserve Force while attending college, eventually taking a job at a powder factory. He eventually…
Leah Bodine Drake was born on December 22, 1904 in Chanute, Kansas to Thomas and Cornelia (née Bodine) Drake. Her father worked in the oil industry. Drake was sent to the Oakhurst School for Girls in Cincinnati and later attended Hamilton College, a junior college operated by Transylvania University, in Lexington, Kentucky as well as Sayre College in the same city. Drake began publishing poetry in 1935 and is primarily known as a poet, although she also published some short…
George Griffith was born George Chetwynd Griffith-Jones on August 20, 1857 in Plymouth, England to George Alfred Jones and Jeanette Henry Capinster Jones. The family did not have roots to any specific place as his father’s role as a clergyman kept him moving from parish to parish. By the time George was seven, his father had served in at least six different parishes. He was home-schooled by his parents and allowed to teach himself from books in his father’s library. …
Ever hear of the legend of Top Shelf Books? Gene Wolfe did! I first heard about the legendary Top Shelf Books from four people who had frequented that mythical venue. However, they were not together when they mentioned the place, and the interval between tellings was years and across many locations. What I eventually learned was that it was a used book shop that hosted open-mic readings for writers. The “open-mic” writer’s group ran from ~2007-2013, in Top Shelf Books…
Karl Edward Wagner (1945 – 1994) is one writer I make a concerted effort to collect. I think I have almost his entire output, which is — unfortunately—not extensive. The man was a genius and I wish it was more. I met him briefly at a conference and corresponded with him some. He was only 48 when he died and that’s way too young. The first work I found by Wagner (KEW) were his Sword & Sorcery stories of Kane,…
So it was, but it is said that in recompense Mandos gave to Beren and to Lúthien thereafter a long span of life and joy, and they wandered knowing thirst nor cold in the fair land of Beleriand, and no mortal Man thereafter spoke to Beren or his spouse. from The Quenta Silmarillion When I wrote about The Silmarillion last year, without much detail, I described the story of Beren and Lúthien as the great love story of Middle-earth. Inspired…