Write Stuff: July 2020

Monday, July 20, 2020

After Reading: FOUR ZINES OF ELSEWHERE by Meg Moseman

This volume collects four lovingly crafted zines/artists' books — Of Elsewhere: An Exoskeleton, Of the Firebirds, Of Unreal Identities, and Of Sorrow’s End — into a single 48-page work of fantastical (perhaps mystical) poetry, prose, and artwork.

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We had a chance to get to know Meg last week (check out her interview!), so today I thought I'd post a review of her Four Zones of Elsewhere, which such a delight!

Meg's exploration of themes of the fantastical, as well as self exploration, are lyrical and a pleasure to explore. The artwork that accompanies them is wonderful, with a million little details to find in the bright colors and intricate designs. They fit perfectly with the poetry in surprising ways, and offer an additional layer to ways to perceive the work. I positively loved spending an afternoon reading through all of the zines together, letting them sink in with their delicious depth. My personal favorite is Of the Firebirds, which also carries my favorite artwork, and this line, which I feel is a lovely way to draw in a new reader: "Watch out, dreamers, so that you know when you have crossed out of the realm of solid things into this one, which can never be whole with the wholeness you know." There are so many parts that left me sitting back to let the idea and image roll around in my mind. This is a total delight!

Meg Moseman author of FOUR ZINES OF ELSEWHERE #author #interview

By: Meradeth Houston on 4:00 AM

I'm incredibly happy to introduce my friend and fellow author, Meg Moseman, to you all today! Meg and I have worked together in the library writing group for over seven years now and she has been an indispensable help in so many of my books. Her work is positively lovely and I deeply admire it (and her!), so when I learned she was making her Zines more widely available online, I was very excited! I love the combination of her artistic outlets, art and poetry, and will share more about her piece next week. But for today, let's get to know Meg! (And, should you be interested, my answers to these questions can be found on her blog:)

Are you a plotter or a pantser?
I’m a plotter who spent years trying to be a pantser. You see, Diana Wynne Jones wrote about how, for her, careful outlines “kill it dead.” I loved her accounts of her process, and I wanted mine to be like that too. Of course, (surprise!) different people are different. While I come up with wild and strange ideas when I’m lucky — in the right mood, confident enough, what have you — they don’t come on command. What’s more, I am usually not good at plots at all. They bore me. I like situations and feelings — perhaps why my published writing is poetry, even though I am probably better at prose.

Who are some favorite authors, and why do they mean so much to you?
My deepest favorites are Diana Wynne Jones and C.S. Lewis. Diana Wynne Jones is a wild, sideways, gloriously original thinker who writes twisty, sneaky, wise, literate fantasy, mostly for children. I’ll talk more about C.S. Lewis in a moment, but for now I’ll say he represents (by comparison, at least) my “left brain” (though I know that dichotomy oversimplifies the reality): bright, clear, thoughtful, reasoned, scrupulously moral — intensely emotional, too, more openly so than DWJ, but in a what I think of as a “daylight” way; there are intuitions, surreality, and dream-logic like hers, too, but they are not given as much sway. I haven’t bonded as deeply with any authors since, but, for speculative fiction, I love Jason Vanhee’s short YA horror novel Engines of the Broken World, everything I’ve read by Octavia Butler, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Charles Williams’ novels, and David Lindsay’s bizarre A Voyage to Arcturus. For classics, I especially like Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, and Blake.

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What inspired your most recent book?
This book is an anthology of zines I’d made before and printed locally. In the first three zines, I took poems and snatches of prose I’d written previously and illustrated them copiously. In the fourth, the art (mostly self-portraits, defined loosely) came first, and I wrote or borrowed (from public domain sources) commentary to accompany them. All are part of a larger project I call Evernost — a prose/poetry/visual art thing revolving around a fantasy plot, a girl’s mystical experience, and the cycle of the seasons in constantly evolving ways.

How does your day job as a bookstore clerk affect your creative work? Has it changed your standards? Has it changed how you look at writing?
I started out thinking I was a middle grade or young adult writer. You’d think working in the children’s section of a bookstore would be inspirational, but even though I love my job — I work with smart, hilarious, wonderful people — engaging with books as merchandise (how many Amazon reviews? how long did it take to sell last time we had it? appealing cover?) rather than as — relationships? — records of inner worlds? — intense and unique emotional experiences? — makes me jaded and pessimistic. I think it’s given me a desire to be not only different (I hope, and half-believe, that we are all different, unique, despite our drive to shove ourselves and each other into boxes) but visibly different. I’ve wanted to mix poetry and art and prose for years, but I’m not sure I would have dared to if I hadn’t been depressed by the volume of passionate, good, careful kids’ fantasy and seen how generic it all seems from a distance. (Seems, not is. I’m vain, though; I don’t even want to seem generic, especially not to myself.)

Inspiration and perspiration — in what forms does inspiration come to you? How important is “the muse” to your creative process? What parts of writing “just come” and what parts require hard work?
My muse is — tricky. She runs away whenever I look straight at her but waves sparkly things at me that I can only see from the corner of my eye when I’m trying to work. For a few years, I could make myself write thousands of words a day whether I was “feeling it” or not, but that sense of resolve has faded, and I didn’t get satisfying results anyway. Beginnings, seeds, ideas, feelings — come (though rarely these days; I struggle to fulfill old visions rather than stumbling upon new ones). Periods of enthusiasm, which may be slightly different from inspiration itself, make work exciting rather than painful. But soon enough exhaustion sets in and everything is hard work — that’s the base state.

Tricky touchy one: God. We are two pretty secular people, but we both find ourselves drawn to topics usually associated with religion (again in our different ways). Why?
I’ve been fascinated with the trappings of religion — every religion I met, pretty much — since I was tiny and asked my parents, with giggles and unbearable embarrassment, to have me baptized. When I was thirteen came C.S. Lewis’s adult fiction and Christian apologetics, which I devoured even though I disagreed passionately with most of his arguments. Something about his imagination, his style of thinking, and his wit “clicked” with me more dramatically than any writer’s has before or since, to the point that I still can’t tell which thoughts of mine are mine and which come from something I’ve read of his. I hope that Evernost, in addition to fleshing out moments of intense inspiration, will also help me grapple with his thought.

About the Author:
Meg has enjoyed drawing, writing, and assembling books since the age when she could barely write her own name. She lives in the mountains of Montana, where she puts her English degree to use in the children’s section of an independent bookstore. In her spare time, she reads, writes, and illustrates fantasy and poetry, mostly centered on a huge project she calls her “I want to be William Blake when I grow up” project. Favorite authors include C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, Diana Wynne Jones, Kafka, Melville, Dickinson, and many others. Her poetry has appeared in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly and The Mythic Circle, and she recently self-published Four Zines of Elsewhere! Check out her Amazon author page, or, if pictures are more your thing, her Instagram and her Redbubble.

Book Blitz: A SPECTACLE OF SOULS by Jessica Julien

By: Meradeth Houston on 4:00 AM

A Spectacle of Souls
Jessica Julien
(Circus of the Stolen #1)
Published by: Bleeding Ink Publishing
Publication date: July 7th 2020
Genres: Adult, Paranormal, Romance

Caitlyn always thought she was just your average small-town waitress, but she’s anything but average. Suffering from frequent headaches and vivid daydreams, her oddities mask a secret hidden deep within her mind—one that could defeat even the cleverest of psychics.

When a mysterious circus arrives in town, Caitlyn is immediately drawn to it. While visiting the hypnotic show, she meets a seer who warns her of a gruesome future and urges her to stay away. But soon, Caitlyn finds herself ensnared in the show and the Ringmaster himself.

Recognizing Caitlyn’s powers for what they are, and believing they are the ones he has been searching for, the Ringmaster is determined to claim them as his own. Trapped within the circus and the Ringmaster’s devious grip, Caitlyn realizes that to escape the seer’s foretold fate, her only choice is to fight. Banding together with Bevier, an imprisoned psychic, Meg, an eccentric seamstress, and Daniel, a handsome magician, Caitlyn falls into the Psychic Realm to thwart the Ringmaster and stop the show before they succumb to his control and are trapped forever in his spectacle of souls.

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Author Bio:
Born in the picturesque state of Washington, Jessica Julien is the marketing director of a boutique publishing company, a stay at home mom, wife, and wanderluster. When not drafting marketing plans or doing laundry, she spends her time writing young adult and new adult novels focused on the paranormal and supernatural inspired by her love of all things dark and twisty. With her vivacious imagination, witty personality, and ability to bring sarcasm to a new level Jessica creates unique worlds and characters that readers can't help but hate to love and love to hate.

In her free time, Jessica can be found enjoying a cup of dark roasted coffee while snuggling under a blanket with a good book. When the weather is right she hops in the car with her husband, son, and dogs to road trip across the country where she delights in eating red vines, drinking iced lattes, and singing loudly in the passenger seat.

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