Below is the short film, which I produced collaboratively with Lloyd Eddy (visual artist) and Joshua Legg (choreographer and dancer). It premiered at the multimedia concert, movement/text/image, on April 1, 2016 at Lake Superior State University. Such an amazing experience to collaborate with artists in other disciplines! Text: Fragments from the Alchemist’s Handbook You’ll need the stone…
Author: Mary McMyne
The Alchemy of Teaching Writing
It’s been a whirlwind semester, so far. In addition to reading and editing fiction submissions for Border Crossing with two wonderful interns, I’ve been teaching two courses for the first time: a course on Responding to Writing for future teachers, and an intermediate creative writing course for majors and minors that is specifically designed to help students take risks in their writing, to…
The Gossamer Pleasures of Faerie Magazine
Last summer, I started editing poetry for Faerie Magazine, the lush quarterly edited by Carolyn Turgeon, which was just profiled in the Style section of the New York Times. If you haven’t heard about Faerie yet, you should check out this article, which examines the magazine’s “gossamer pleasures” and calls it “wonderfully curious and deeply weird.” I have to say, it’s been a delight to read all…
Wolf Skin Wins 2015 Elgin Chapbook Award
I received news yesterday that my debut poetry chapbook, Wolf Skin, won the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s 2015 Elgin Chapbook Award! The award honors the best speculative poetry chapbook published in 2013-2014. I was honored to be nominated, and I’m just plain thrilled to win! I’ve been writing speculative poetry since I was a kid, and I’m amazed to have…
Two Poems in Phantom Drift
I was excited to find the latest issue of Phantom Drift: A Journal of New Fabulism in the mail today. This issue includes two of my poems, “Instructions for Letting the Stranger into Your Bed” and “Ahab’s Sister-Wives,” along with poems by Ki Russell and Gregg Murray, a story by Stephen Langlois, and more! Phantom Drift is always delightfully…
New Review of Wolf Skin in American Book Review
I have been traveling on and off, since early May, so I only just got the chance to be amazed by this wonderful new review of Wolf Skin in the latest issue of American Book Review! Huge thanks are in order to Saara Myrene Raappana for her insightful close reading. Here’s an excerpt: Reaching beyond the simple retelling or recasting…
Two Poems in Ninth Letter
The latest issue of Ninth Letter features two of my poems, “The Sleagh Maith: A Nocturne,” part of my series on folklorist Robert Kirk, and “Open Letter to the Frog Princess,” a poem retelling the Brothers Grimm fairy tale, The Frog King or Iron Heinrich, popularly known as The Princess and the Frog. Also in the issue…
Residency at Vermont Studio Center
I just finished a month-long writing residency at Vermont Studio Center, where I spent each day writing in a beautiful studio with a view of the Gihon River and attended readings, slideshows, and talks almost every night. Especially fascinating was visiting poet Sherwin Bitsui‘s seminar on translation and the way language carries culture, and visiting novelist Matt Bell‘s talk on revision, which was exactly what I needed…