everyday is halloween

by the time i hit the ripe old age of 16 i knew writing/reading would become my life.  i was a terrible student.  i still am.  the older i get the more ignorant i know i've become.  i really didn't start reading until 16.  yes, i was an awful student, but i've always been an advanced reader.  but when at the age of 16 i started reading every book i could get my hands on is when i began my life in language.  

no surprise when i discovered horror fiction as i've long long been, since a wee lad, a great fan of my beloved genre of horror.  i would go to local bookstores & scour the horror section.  you heard that right.  bookstores used to have a dedicated aisle or two of horror fiction.  i went to school there.  & i started writing my own kind of weird fiction.

but it was around 18 or so that my attentions gravitated toward poetry.  i stopped reading religiously writers like clive barker, dennis etchison [a grand writer who lived in the nearby city of stockton], ray bradbury, etc etc.  i did read horror fiction but fiction was soon supplanted by rimbaud & dylan thomas.  i never stopped watching horror movies cheesy & not.  

but around the late '80s i discovered a horror writer that i've come to love, steve rasnic tem, whose short stories were like ambient prose poems.  indeed, the bio notes of the anthologies where i read his work stated that he began as a poet.  & so, i've lost & given away many of my copies of books of horror but i've kept two anthologies from the late 1980s because they both have stories by tem.  

of course, i would lose track of tem's bibliography over the years.  but this halloween i have rediscovered tem & am delighted that he is not a'feared of technology.  he has a youtube channel.  he tweets.  he's published in online journals, & e-books.  a thing horror writers & poets have in common: small presses.  many horror writers publish in small presses & many have moved online.  just like poets.  

does tem still write poetry?  i sure hope so.  he does write about my favorite holiday.  you can read an essay he published last year about the high holiday by clicking here.  

i've long given up writing fiction as a bad job.  but the thought of writing horror poetry does fill my boots with the good kind of terror.  horror haiku?  oooooooo!  there is sci fi poetry.  there is science poetry.  why not monster poetry too?

hmmm...

boo