A Moment with Jenny Blackford

How long did it take you to get your first publication, and what were some of the obstacles you had to overcome?

That's a surprisingly complicated question! I'll have to tackle it in layers.

If you had asked me ten years ago, I would have said that my first publication was "Dave's Diary" back in 2002. It's a creepy sf short story for kids, in which aliens are stealthily taking over Dave's suburb. Dave realizes something is wrong when his hippie mother and heavily-tattooed older sister start going all Stepford Wives, but it's not long before Dave himself is taken over. I wrote it for a set of two-story paperbacks for kids that was edited by Meredith Costain and Paul Collins, who to my great joy accepted it.

So what obstacles had I faced? For a start, Meredith and Paul are by no means pushovers, even for old friends, and my story had to be at least as good as the stories submitted by real published authors. They'd kindly but firmly rejected a story I'd submitted for a previous project. But the main obstacle to the publication of this, my first published story, was that I had needed time and space to let my brain work creatively, so that I could actually write it. A lot of time and space. Basically, I needed to leave my job of twenty years.

I know that many people can work at high-pressure jobs and still manage to write two thousand words at the kitchen table before breakfast or after midnight, or a thousand words every weekend, or whatever works for them. Some even manage to sneak in a few hundred words while they're in the office. But none of those strategies ever worked for me.

I spent twenty years as a computer network specialist, at first with IBM then running my own consultancy, and during that time I didn't manage to write any creative words, though I was heavily involved with books and writing. I was a partner (with my husband Russell Blackford) in small press Ebony Books, which published lovely things including Damien Broderick's novel Transmitters; I was one of the founding members of the collective that produced Australian Science Fiction Review: Second Series; and I wrote many reviews for the New York Review of Science Fiction and the Age newspaper – but I simply couldn't produce creative words during those twenty years. I could stare at a piece of paper, or a computer screen, for hours or days, but nothing happened. My brain was set purely to produce analytic thought, not for creativity. Even when I tapered down to working two days a week, the creative juices still refused to do their bit.

I gave up my day job totally in mid-2001, and spent a lot of time gardening, walking and generally decompressing. I almost despaired that it would ever happen, but eventually the creative words started to flow, and kept on flowing. So you could say that "Dave's Diary" took twenty-one years from when I started at IBM, or one year from when I gave up computer networking, or even longer, if you count in the absence of any creative writing during my four-year Classics (Greek and Latin) degree plus two years of my long-unfinished Ph.D in comparative ancient religion.

But I had in fact been published decades before that story came out. I had almost forgotten, because I'd almost forgotten about writing poetry until I started doing it seriously again, this last few years.

Back when I was fifteen or sixteen years old, my English class in a (fairly rough) high school near Newcastle, north of Sydney (in sunny Australia) was set the task of writing poems to enter into the Hunter Valley Research Foundation Poetry Prize. Mine won, which pleased my English teacher immensely, and emboldened me to submit the poem to my favorite magazine, Dolly – which published it and sent a gratifying check. (That was before the cult of celebrity took over the world, and even a magazine aimed at teenage girls included serious content.) I had no idea at the time how unlikely this publication was, so fear of rejection wasn't an issue!

So what were the obstacles to that publication? (Deep breath.) It was really, truly, seriously difficult, to be a poet in a rough high school in a working class town. It wasn't easy being anything much, at my school, unless you were one of the rough kids, and, preferably, a surfer. My life was rejection, scorn and mockery from everyone except a handful of like-minded close friends. In retrospect, though, it's hard to know whether the others mocked and scorned me any more for being a poet as well as a "brain", or whether being conspicuously clever was a sufficient crime – so maybe it wasn't as big an obstacle as it may have seemed at the time.

But even that long-ago glossy-magazine publication wasn't my first. There's one more layer in this onion. Back when I was a tween, I spent a lot of my spare time sending poetry and (very bad) artwork in to the kids' page of the Sunday newspaper. Most of the time I got cards denoting points; when the points mounted up, they could be exchanged for cash. At least once, though, one of my poems was actually published.

While I was looking for something completely different last year, I found a newspaper clipping of what I'm fairly sure was my first paid publication, a poem, "Viking", which even notes my age as twelve, and shows that I was paid $1.50 for it. (Once more, the major obstacle was increased opprobrium at school.)

My immensely helpful husband read the newspaper clipping with delight, when I showed it to him. I'd thought it embarrassing juvenilia, but he told me that the new-found poem was perfectly all right, and that I should send it to the School Magazine – our equivalent of the US Cricket. I did, with a note about its rediscovery – and it's going to be reprinted in the August issue of that marvelous institution of a literary magazine for kids.

Viking
Slender, clad in white,
with her golden plaits
over her shoulders, and
wearing a torque
of twisted silver,
she looks at the stars
and thinks of a Viking
in his longship,
tall and strong,
the light of sunrise
glinting on his helmet
and his sword.

– Jenny Blackford

Jenny Blackford's stories and poems have appeared in places as diverse as Random House's 30 Australian Ghost Stories for Children and The Pedestal Magazine. Pamela Sargent described Jenny's historical novella set in classical Athens and Delphi, The Priestess and the Slave, as "elegant." Jenny's current major project is writing the violent, sexy life of Bronze Age princess Medea.

Learn more about Jenny Blackford on her website and blog.

Speculative Poetry and the Writings of Jennifer Clement

by Wilda Morris

Speculative poetry is a fairly broad category. There is no universally accepted definition, even among journals for which it is a specialty. Alan Deniro has even argued that “All poetry is speculative in this sense: there is a chasm after every line break, and a deep unknowing of the next line until it is reached.” This statement would not provide a very helpful guideline for an editor selecting poems for a journal or anthology of speculative poetry.

It is generally more helpful to think of speculative literature as creating a world which differs in some ways from the world as we “know” it, from the perspective of Western rational realism. Magical realism, fantasy, science fiction, myth, folklore, fairy tales, and surrealism, the mainstays of speculative poetry, create their own worlds.

A few important prizes are offered for speculative poetry, evidence that the genre is being taken seriously by at least some critics. In 1978, the Science Fiction Poetry Association initiated the Rhysling Award. Each year the association picks one long and one short speculative poem from among poems nominated by members of the association. The nominated poems are published in an anthology. More recently, the Association announced the creation of the Elgin Award for a chapbook of speculative poetry. The Rannu Fund, founded in 2008, offers one prize in speculative fiction and one in speculative poetry.

Jennifer Clement, co-founder and director of The San Miguel Poetry Week in Mexico first got me interested in trying my hand at speculative poetry. In a writing workshop, she challenged participants to try writing something surreal. She suggested that we find some way to persuade the reader to suspend disbelief. My poem began with the assumption that someone had dropped something into my cola.

Clement is an accomplished (and award-winning) writer of speculative fiction and poetry. You can read more about her on her website.

Clement’s work makes use of magical realism, surrealism, myth, science, science fiction, psychological suspense, history—and peculiar people and incidents about which she reads. In both her fiction and her poetry she makes use of all the senses. Taste and smell often play an important role. Her fiction and poetry are rife with myth and metaphor.

Clement’s broad-ranging interest show up in her work—anthropology, science, strange and unusual stories. Her poem series, “The Lady of the Broom” (for which Jan Gilbert composed “Eleven Song Setting”) is based on a character mentioned briefly in James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson. Another set of poems is composed of “Seven Letters Written by Marie Curie to Pierre Curie After His Death.” The astronomer Caroline Herschel shows up in her poetry, as does Einstein. It is often said that science fiction that depicts a coming era actually says more about the present than the future. These poems depicting the past are also speculative, saying as much or more about the present (and the poet’s interests and thoughts) as about the past. They are, in a sense, science fiction projected backward instead of forward in time.

I am intrigued by her poems “The Ocean House” and “The Night House,” both of which are in the “New Poems” section of her New and Selected Poems (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2008), pp. 21-23). In these poems, Clement imagines new worlds. In “The Night House,” she says, “there is no shelf for my shadow.” Here is a line on which I could muse for quite a long time!

The Ocean House
He built a house for me on the ocean floor
and planted a pine tree and azaleas.
He even built a chimney in the water –
a chimney I can swim up and down inside.
When I live in our ocean house,
I am not interested in rivers
and streams or even drinking water.

On the ocean floor,
when he says kneel, I obey.
The sun is obedient to the shadow.
The clouds are obedient to the wind.
My breath is obedient to my heart.
So when he asks
I kneel down on the sand
and rest my head against his knees.

In our ocean house the bricks sink
and the wooden beams float away.
Our clothes (and this is the truth)
are devoured by sharks
and a barracuda has eaten all his hats.
But he does not mind.
and I do not mind
because, underwater,
we move so, so slowly
one dance can last for days.

~ Jennifer Clement

These two poems of Clement’s inspired me to invent a new world, a shadow world. Here is my poem:

Our Shadow House
after Jennifer Clement

Before entering,
we slide out of skin
and skeleton.

Even sun
cannot create silhouettes
of our abandoned bodies.

We eat the shadows
of apples and pears, sip
water from our phantom well.

When moon glows above,
you wrap an illusory arm
around me,

run fingers
along the penumbra
of my vertebrae.

The shadows of my toes curl.

~ Wilda

Speculative writing frees the poet to use his or her imagination. Although these poems are not “realistic,” they have their own logic. The reader can just enjoy these strange worlds or, with careful attention, may siphon truths hiding under the details and speculate about possible meanings. And maybe reading these poems will inspire you to write a poem in which you invent a new world.

Wilda Morris, Workshop Chair for Poets & Patrons of Chicago, and a past president of the Illinois State Poetry Society, is widely published in print and on the Internet. Her book, Szechwan Shrimp and Fortune Cookies: Poems from a Chinese Restaurant, was published by RWG Press. Wilda Morris's Poetry Challenge provides a poetry contest for other poets each month. In addition to poetry, she writes an occasional nature blog (“Walking with Nature”) for the Bolingbrook Patch, an on-line newspaper.