Strange Horizons poetry podcast

My voice is now on the internet in the Strange Horizons poetry podcast for July: listen to the podcast here!

It is so weird to listen to myself doing a poetry reading. I like reading out loud,* but I haven’t ventured too much into actually performing my poetry. I’m fine with reading my own stuff out at my writers’ group, but anything more public, and the nerves start twanging. I’m glad I dared do this reading for the podcast, though!

* As a teenager, I read the Harry Potter books out loud to my youngest sister up till the fifth book or so. Lots of fun – I really liked doing all the different voices. My Dobby-voice was my wee sister’s favourite, because I aimed for hilariously high and squeaky. :D

Poetry sale: Plunge Magazine

I’m back from a wonderful trip to the UK – much silliness, laughter and shenanigans ensued in London, Elmswell and Deganwy. I swam in a glacial lake in my underwear, took lots of photos of castles and the Welsh hills, watched trolling Saruman and enjoyed myself muchly in the company of dear friends. The only downside is that my trip wasn’t long enough to produce proper homesickness for Finland, so now I’m missing the UK rather a lot. That’s what you get for having two home countries of a sort like I do, I suppose.

Anyway, now that I’m back, I can share news of the yayworthy variety: my poem ‘The Understanding’ will appear in the next issue of Plunge Magazine!

Plunge is an awesome new publication with a tagline that piqued my interest at once: “queer. women. genre.”. I’m really pleased that ‘The Understanding’ has found a home in such a lovely magazine. It’s a poem that is a marriage of my love for manuscript studies and fantasy: a lyric from an edition of “Middle Argental” poems. Mmm, fake manuscript editions. So much fun.

I’ll post a link when the new issue is up!

‘Wolf Daughter’ online at Strange Horizons!

I feel like a fool because my poem ‘Wolf Daughter’ has been online at Strange Horizons for a week, and I’ve failed to notice before now!

Read it here!

Anyway! This is my celebratory wee-hours-of-the-night post. I feel really happy to have a poem in Strange Horizons – it’s a wonderful publication full of really excellent speculative writing. They also do podcasts of the stories and poems that are up – the podcast including me reading ‘Wolf Daughter’ will be up later this month. I’ll post a link to that when it’s up.

The first lines of ‘Wolf Daughter’ spilled out in a sudden burst last autumn, and the first draft was born in a rush of words. It’s set in a world like pseudo-nineteenth-century Finland, with tints of Finnishness and folklore. This loosely-inspired-by-Finnish-folklore thing is something of an occasionally-recurring feature in my speculative poems. There may well be more where ‘Wolf Daughter’ came from.