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Spent today at a poetry workshop run by ChiZine poetry editor Sandra Kasturi and my brother David Clink the poetrymachine.com webmaster. It was a great workshop, well run, good location, etc. We did 14 different poetry exercises. I ended up with about 22 1/2 first draft poems.

Also, the Global Warnings anthology I'm in (new title: A Verdant Green: A Poetry Anthology to Celebrate the Lives of Anna and William McCoy) is launching on March 4th. I'm in with some great Canadian poets: bill bissett, Allan Briesmaster, Jenna Butler, George Elliott Clarke, Karen Connelly, Barry Dempster, Maureen Scott Harris, Stephen Humphrey, Sandra Kasturi, Carolyn Malyon, Allan Glenn Rose, and Raymond Souster. David Clink is the editor.

I had a poem accepted by Star*Line last month -- to appear later in the year.

I have to submit 3 tanka to Gusts for their February 15 deadline. Oh, and in December, I submitted to Ice Floe, poetry of the far north. Have not heard back.

I keep missing meetings of my poetry workshop: the Algonquin Square Table. But should make it tomorrow. Polish up one of these exercise poems from today and take it in. :)Read more

Yikes, the year went by fast! Two months in Saskatoon will do that. :)

Still waiting on the publication of Global Warnings, should be Spring 2010... maybe. Also pissed that while I made the deadline, other poets in the book couldn't be bothered to. They were turning their poems in in April. Hey, my poems could have used another round of editing, too.

Distant Early Warnings: Canada's Best Science Fiction came out this summer -- looks great! Got paid for it and everything! :) Also got my contributor copies of Room and a cheque. W00T! Did not submit to Tesseracts 14 -- ran out of time. Same thing for Gusts and NoD and a bunch of other mags. Sigh. If you don't submit... :(

Poetry editing for Chizine is going along well. I've got some in my inbox that I must attend to this weekend. Poets!

And Al Moritz, the intrepid leader of my poetry workshop (the Algonquin Square Table), won the Griffin Award for his poetry! Way to go, Al!Read more

Wow, first blog of the new year! ;)

So, I did meet my brother's deadline of 8 pages of environmental poems due January 1st. And they are pretty good if I do say so myself! ;) No indication of when the book Global Warnings will be published.

I did hear back from Tesseracts 13 -- a nice personal note from one of the editors, Nancy Kilpatrick. She says that one of my poems was on the short list, but in the end they decided not to publish any poetry. Sandra Kasturi got the same story, so it must be true. ;)

At the last minute, I submitted to Room: A Space of Your Own because I heard 3rd hand that they were doing a speculative issue. And I got accepted! W00T! Which leads me to the next paragraph.

I signed up for the Market Maven newsletter from Cythia Ward. It contains all kinds of market news for speculative magazines. So, I could have found out about Room's call for submissions before the last minute. (Not that I wouldn't have procrastinated until the last minute anyway. ;)

Oh, and I submitted 3 Turkey tanka to Gusts just before their February 15th deadline. (Tanka about the country Turkey, not the bird.) (I've now run out of smiley faces.)

W00T! I got paid by Pearson Educational for the two reprint poems they accepted last summer ("Very Large Array" and "Stars") for their upcoming textbook Literacy in Action 8: Time will Tell by Chris Atkinson. It was odd because they asked me how much they should pay me. So, I eventually decided to err on the cheap side and asked for $50 each. I probably could have gotten more...

"Stars" is also being reprinted in the RJS Books anthology, Distant Early Warnings: The Best Canadian Science Fiction to be launched at the World SF Convention this August in Montreal. My brother David's poem "Copyright Notice, 2525" will also be in the book. (Both our poems were Aurora Award finalists earlier this millennium.)

I have been told that W00T!, to be correctly spelled, must have zeros instead of ohs. So, I'm trying to do that.

I had entered the Writers Circle of Durham Region's poetry chapbook contest in Spring of 2008 (judging chapbooks published in the previous year). I made the "long list" of about 15 with Snapshots published by believe your own press. And I knew I didn't place in the top 3 winners. (Each winner got $100.) But this past weekend I found out I just missed the cut! I was in the final 5! Which is really nice to know. :D Credit is due to the chapbook's designer, Carleton Wilson.

That's all my poetry news for now!

Today, I heard from Space and Time Magazine, they accepted one of the five poems that I submitted in November. Woot!

I'm still working towards my brother's deadline. He needs 8 "pages" of poetry, where a page is 25 lines or so. I have 5 pages that have been workshopped and are in pretty good shape... and three pages of first draft. It'll be close. ;)

I bought The Canadian Writers' Contest Calendar 2009. I buy one copy every year for me and one for my brother as a Christmas gift. It has "detailed information on Canadian writing contests, awards and prizes, organized month by month according to their deadline dates." Visit White Mountain Publications and check it out.

I have not heard back from either Dream Catcher (the Irish magazine) or Tesseracts 13. But they both had October 31st deadlines, so I suspect I'll be waiting a while.

And I paid up my dues to the Science Fiction Poetry Association. They're a great organization, check them out! The price is more than worth it just for the publications!

My, what a difference one month makes! The decision of the jury for the Governor General's Award in Poetry has sparked much controversy. I will not add anything, other than I hoped that Al Moritz would win. He did not.

I did submit to Space and Time by the November 30th deadline, but did not manage to submit to On Spec.

I got a cheque for $5 in the mail yesterday from the SFPA for my poem "A Shiver Runs Through It." It's in the September/October issue of Star*Line, which just arrived today.

This has been a pretty good year for me, publication wise. I had seven poems published in 2008: the one in Star*Line, plus two (tanka) poems in Gusts #7, three (tanka) poems in Gusts #8, and one poem, "Building Mechanical Butterflies" in NôD.

I'm just back from the World Fantasy Convention in Calgary, Alberta. I wrangled some poets together and we had an open mic reading on the Thursday night at 10pm.

The poets who read were:

• Joe Haldeman
  
• David Lunde
  
• Colleen Anderson
  
• Rhea Rose
  
• Eileen Kernaghan
  
• Rhonda Parrish

Well, I didn't win or place in the Science Fiction Poetry Association's contest. But I did take one of the poems I had submitted to my workshop's first meeting of the year and got a lot of good feedback.

I submitted 5 poems to the Irish literary journal called Dream Catcher. They're having a special Canadian issue. One of the poems I submitted was written at last year's Write Off.

I also submitted 4 poems to Tesseracts 13, the latest anthology from Canadian publisher Edge Books. Being the 13th installment, they went for a theme of Dark Fantasy or Horror. I think they'll be launching at the World SF Convention in Montreal. Deadline is October 31, 2008!

Also on my horizon is possibly submitting to Space and Time and/or On Spec. Both of whom have deadlines of November 30.

Other news is I've accepted a position as Assistant Poetry Editor at Chizine Publications. (A wonderful online magazine of Dark Fantasy and Horror fiction and poetry.) I'm helping the Poetry Editor, Sandra Kasturi, get through their backlog of submissions. I've done poetry editing before — for Tesseracts 6, and for the TransVersions Anthology. But it's been a while, so I'm a bit rusty. :)

This long weekend we are hosting a "write-off" in our home with between 4 and 6 guest authors staying with us. Four arrived on Thursday, two more arrived on Friday. One had to go home on Saturday, then came back on Sunday.

My husband Rob first encountered "write-offs" in Calgary where IFWA (The Imaginative Fiction Writers of Alberta) hold them twice a year.

The idea is that a bunch of writers get together and write all weekend. You break for lunch and dinner, where you talk and compare progress, etc. Then on the Sunday night you read some of what you've written to each other.

Some "write-offs" you commute to — you stay somewhere else overnight and go to the "write-off" location with your laptop each morning.

Our "write-off" is a sleep-over. Everyone is staying here on our pull-out couches and in the condo guest suite. The writers here are: Robert J. Sawyer & Carolyn Clink (hosts), Hayden Trenholm, Liz Trenholm, Herb Kauderer, Al Katerinsky, Pat Forde, and David Clink.

I've been editing old poems, rather than writing new ones. I have a bunch of poems I took to my poetry writing workshop, The Algonquin Square Table, last year that were critiqued, but I'd never applied the critique to fix them up. So, I've done that now for about 7 poems.

I did also write one new poem. That was because the Science Fiction Poetry Association was having a contest with a deadline of today. (Luckily they only take submissions online!!) I had two poems already written that fit their theme (energy) and their criteria (20 lines or less, PG rated, not previously published). Yay! But, they allow three submissions. So, I had to write a new poem to make my third submission.

So, I went with an acrostic (where the first letter of each line spells something out as you read down the lines). Mine says energy crisis. Hardly worthy of Yeats, but what can you do?

Next up I want to submit to an Irish poetry magazine that's doing a special Canadian issue. Woohoo! Deadline is the end of September.

It's coming up on one year since we went to China. The news is full of Olympic stories. The biggest one seems to be about the pollution in Beijing. We were in China for 10 days, and only saw blue skies once -- at the Great Wall at Jinshanling. Beijing's skies are silver. In Chengdu the grey skies rained every day.

The athletes should also be worried about the heat and humidity. It will be difficult to perform well in Beijing, I think.