Allyson Shaw's Blog, page 9
May 18, 2019
New Patreon Page
[image error] I love DIY culture, and owe much of my life to its ethos. For years I have supported artists I admire on Patreon, which embodies the ethos but is even better as it creates community around creators. [image error] It’s a website that lets you support artists and writers and in exchange you get an exclusive look at their work before it goes out into the world. I have been building my Patreon page for a while and finally decided to launch it today, at the May full moon. I will be adding weekly updates about my creative process as well as monthly poems, short fiction or non fiction pieces inspired by folklore, witchcraft and the wild landscape. I hope you will join me on this journey.
July 28, 2015
Poem in the Monster Verse Anthology
[image error]I’m delighted that a poem of mine will be included in the Monster Verse, Poems Human and Inhuman anthology, to be published by Random House on September 15th, 2015. The anthology is edited by Tony Barnstone and Michelle Mitchell-Foust.
About the anthology, from the Random House website:
Humans have always defined themselves by imagining the inhuman; the gloriously gruesome monsters that enliven our literary legacy haunt us by reflecting our own darkest possibilities. The poems gathered here range in focus from extreme examples of human monstrousness—murderers, cannibals, despotic Byzantine empresses—to the creatures of myth and nightmare: dragons, sea serpents, mermaids, gorgons, sirens, witches, and all sorts of winged, fanged, and fire-breathing grotesques. The ghastly parade includes Beowulf’s Grendel, Homer’s Circe, William Morris’s Fafnir, Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwock, Robert Lowell’s man-eating mermaid, Oriana Ivy’s Baba Yaga, Thom Gunn’s take on Jeffrey Dahmer, and Shakespeare’s hybrid creature Caliban, of whom Prospero famously concedes, “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
Monster Verse is both a delightful carnival of literary horror and an entertainingly provocative investigation of what it means to be human.
September 11, 2014
Dispatches from Fantasycon 2014
The York Minster. Taken with my iphone using Snapseed editing.
This year Fantasycon was in York, convenient for me as I live behind the rail station so the con was essentially in my back yard. The popular joke at the con was that York was indeed Winterfell. I confess I went simply because it was close to me– but fantasy is the genre I have always loved and with the embrace of the New Weird, it has become even closer to my heart.
The first con I ever attended was GenCon back in 1984. I was a dorky kid who played D&D. I remember trying to disguise my budding womanhood by wearing a man’s shirt and a fedora. I ended up wandering around pretty lonely, not knowing how how to approach the myriad boys and men around me. (I don’t remember any other girls, though there must have been some.) I was shy then, and not much has changed though I no longer wear men’s shirts and fedoras– maybe I should.
I still found the social aspect of this recent con daunting. Everyone was chatting in groups– presumably they’d known each other for years, or so it seemed. There was no way to enter into conversations as a lone woman. Or at least i should say I found it daunting.
And yet, things have changed. This was my first Fantasycon– since moving to the UK I have regularly attended Eastercon, the BSFA con– and in the last few years I have sold my hand made jewellery in the dealers room under the Feral Strumpet banner, which has helped me fund my trip to the con.
What I noticed was that feminism was alive and well in almost all the panels I attended. Challenging questions of inclusion and the purpose of violence against women in fiction where electric, bristling with new ideas. Men and women were voicing complex arguments; inclusion and nixing the misogynist cliches in the genre simply makes for richer stories.
Still the statistics are sobering– 50% of fantasy readers are women, yet we make up only 25% of published fantasy writers. These numbers, voiced by Abbadon Editor David Moore in his panel on Grimdark, were repeated in other panels I attended that weekend. There was an urgency to change this, something I had not felt before at any con.
It gave me hope. I would like to go back in time to that little girl hiding in plain sight and say “Hang in there– 30 years from now things will start changing and when they do, it’s going to happen fast.”
April 4, 2012
Olympus 2012– See you there!
I will be in London this weekend, at the British Science Fiction Association Convention. Look for me in the dealers room– I will be trading as Feral Strumpet, selling handmade jewelry and artisan bookmarks. I will also have copies of my novel, The Desperate Ones, for sale there. If you'll be there, stop by and say hello!
November 22, 2011
A Review of Demons, by John Shirley
Demons by John Shirley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Why don't more people talk about this strange book? What sets out to be a bizarre, PKD style satire of altered realities spins out into a suspenseful, truly horrifying morality tale full of incredibly creepy visions rendered in deliciously precise language. You've got to admire what this book achieves in its brevity, especially in the days of obligatory door-stop genre novels. I had a hard time putting it down, but it clearly pushed some subconscious buttons, giving me nightmares for a while, so I had to reluctantly stop reading it for a week. Given Shirley's note in the beginning, there is a bit of uncanny prophesy about it all. My only disappointment was in some of the received gender notions and the cliched use of a sinister female sexuality– the femme fatale, etc. I highly recommend this book and look forward to reading others by Shirley.
November 3, 2011
“The Wintering Party” is now Live at Witness
My fictional account of the mysterious Dyatlov Pass Incident has been published by Witness. You can read it online here: http://witness.blackmountaininstitute.org/author/allysonshaw/
"The Wintering Party" is now Live at Witness
My fictional account of the mysterious Dyatlov Pass Incident has been published by Witness. You can read it online here: http://witness.blackmountaininstitute...
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"The Wintering Party" live at Witness
February 17, 2011
Music and Worldbuilding
Music is a big part of the writing process for me. While writing my series of sestinas, I must have listened to the mesmerising drone of Tony Conrad's Faust hundreds of times. While writing The Desperate Ones I listened to Dub B sides, the ones without lyrics. I heard this track by Demdike Stare while listening to my favourite podcast, A Darker Shade of Pagan and it brought me back to the world of the novel in this immediate way.
Now that I'm writing out another novel world, one that's very different from the dying tech of Pottersfield, I find myself listening to Sharron Kraus and Fursaxa and other dark folk, but that is the subject of another post.
February 15, 2011
Happy Lupercalia!
Thalia Took's Pan
It's that time of year again, where the Great Horned One comes to make everything right in that hollow place Valentine's day may have left in you.
This portrait is by one of my favourite artists, Thalia Took. Check out her online gallery, and while you're at it, have a peek at her hilarious Tetanus Burger blog– "A safe space for the children of hoarders." I can relate.
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