Author: leah

The out-of-office is up, there’s a storm coming in, and it’s close enough to the end of the year to call it a day, so: this was 2022 in publications.

Short Fiction
“Sunday in the Park with Hank” in The Deadlands issue 15, July 2022.

Poetry
“Local Leopards” in Qwerty Magazine, Winter 2021.
“Better Attitudes to Pleasure” and “Vestige” in Prairie Fire: A Canadian Magazine of New Writing, Winter 2021-22.
“Breaking Horses” in Grain, Spring 2022.
“fertile week” in Reckoning: Our Beautiful Reward, November 2022.

Non-Fiction
“An Archive or a Heart: A Review of Isaac Fellman’s Dead Collections”, Plenitude Magazine, September 24, 2022.

Editorial
Story reviewer, Imagine 2200 climate fiction contest.

Awards
2022 Utopia Award for Anthology/Collection, (Reckoning 5, as editor with Cécile Cristofari).

2023 is already rearing its head, like it does in this line of work: there’ll be a new poetry in January, and a reviewing residency sometime in spring or summer.

Happy holidays, and see you next year!

Reckoning 5 took home four awards — from seven nominations — at the inaugural Utopia Awards: including Best Anthology, for Cécile and I as editors.

The winning pieces include:

Priya Chand’s “On the Destruction and Restoration of Habitats” for Best Non-Fiction;

Oyedotun Damilola Muees’s “All We Have Left is Ourselves” for Best Short Story;

Remi Skytterstad’s “A Song Born” for Best Novelette.

Needless to say, I’m thrilled for everyone. This project’s been so much more than the sum of its parts, and it’s wonderful to see it recognized out in the wider world.

Congrats to all the nominees and winners!

“Sunday in the Park with Hank“– the experimental short story about 1920s New York, what makes distance and intimacy, and everybody’s ghosts coming along on picnic dates — is in this month’s issue of The Deadlands.

It’s in some great company, both fiction- and poetry-wise; the whole issue’s available for subscribers now, and will be released piece by piece online through the month.

The Spring 2022 issue of Grain is out, and it’s got “Breaking Horses” in it: the piece about Georgia O’Keeffe, codification, colonialism, and depiction but also just a bit of words being wonderful in motion.

It’s gettable through their website or at a whole bunch of Canadian local bookstores!

Spring means a few upcoming public events, all virtual, lined up in a row.

On April 1st, 7-9pm EDT, I’ll be the conversational half of YA author Maya Chhabra’s In Conversation launch for her new, Kirkus-starred verse novel, Chiara in the Dark, hosted by Montreal’s Argo Bookshop. As well as a reading and audience chat, we’ll be talking poetry, editing, and wherever it spirals from there.

On April 13th, I’ll be visiting a first-year Science Fiction and Fantasy class at Framingham State University, which is reading “The Bear Wife” this semester. This one isn’t likely to take interested strangers, but it’s a nice milestone to celebrate.

On May 6th, 12pm-1pm EDT, I’ll be reading at Strong Women, Strange Worlds alongside JF Garrard, Rebecca Gomez Farrell, Jenn Gott, Cerece Rennie Murphy, and Elaine Pascale. It’s six authors, eight minutes each — writer speed dating if you’re looking for a new read.

On July 17th, I’ll be giving a workshop — What Booksellers Wish You Knew About Books — as part of SpecFicNZ’s virtual professional development workshops. This is one of those dream workshops I’ve been cooking up over a space of years, because there’s so much knowledge frontline booksellers have that could make this whole gig a lot easier. It’s accessible to non-members for $10/workshop, as is that whole list of fantastic speakers.

Hope to see you there!

I pulled my contributor’s copies of Qwerty Magazine out of the mailbox yesterday, containing “Local Leopards” — the piece about self-destructive communal loops, complicity, and leopards eating yes, your face, but in the key of “Tupelo”.

Qwerty issue #44 is available for $10 CAD from their site now!

“Sunday in the Park with Hank”, a really very experimental short story about 1920s New York, what makes distance and intimacy, and everybody’s ghosts coming along on picnic dates, has found a good home at The Deadlands.

It was my attempt at something a little like a John Crowley story, after reading And Go Like This blew my entire mind.

It’s likely scheduled for later this summer; news when it’s there to be had.

2022 has come in with two new poems queued up in Canadian literary journals:

“Local Leopards” — a piece about self-destructive communal loops, complicity, and leopards eating yes, your face, but in the key of “Tupelo” — will be in Qwerty Magazine, the University of New Brunswick’s literary journal. It is part of my master plan to make “sounds like Nick Cave” a literary school.

“Breaking Horses” will be in a future issue of Grain. It’s a piece about Georgia O’Keeffe, codification, colonialism, and depiction but also just a bit of words being wonderful in motion; how sometimes you put them in your mouth to see what happens, and trust the result.

Updates when they hit print!

First publication of 2022: two new poems in the winter issue of Canadian lit journal Prairie Fire!

“Better Attitudes to Pleasure” is about a jar of grapefruit marmalade hand-imported from Connecticut which I treated very wrong, austerity mindsets, and extrapolating the problem from there.

“Vestige” is lives at the conjunction of whales, medical trouble, the women’s shelter movement and doing the work even when it sucks.

It’s being mailed out now to subscribers, and is available from their website in single issues.

As odd as it feels to post this in the face of rising case counts (yeah, so this is scary, please stay safe, everyone): a few publications here and there added up into a respectable heap this year.

Short Fiction
“The Instructions” in Neon: A Literary Magazine, Spring 2021.
“The Mysteries” in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 43, June 2021.

Poetry
“A Headful of Hair” in Climbing Lightly Through Forests, R.B. Lemberg and Lisa M. Bradley, eds., January 2021.
“Trojan Road” in Plenitude Magazine, January 2021.
“Rows of Houses” in The Deadlands, October 2021.

Non-Fiction
“Watch the Left Hand: The Magicianship of Jen Sookfong Lee’s The Shadow List”, CAROUSEL Magazine, June 16, 2021.
“Wild Bodies: PW Talks with Aliya Whiteley” in Publishers Weekly, June 18, 2021.
“The Tip of the Iceberg: PW Talks with Richard Butner” in Publishers Weekly, November 5, 2021.

Editorial
Guest poetry editor, Reckoning 5, January 2021.

Proofs for the first 2022 publications are trickling through: three more poems set to publish in the early winter and some non-fiction pending. I hope it finds you safe, well, warm, and with your loved ones.