Outer Alliance Spotlight #39: Rose Lemberg June 18, 2010
Posted by juliarios in : interviews, queer-friendly publishers , trackbackWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #39. Each Friday, the Spotlight features an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our guest this week is Rose Lemberg, editor of the new LGBTQI friendly poetry zine, Stone Telling.
Rose grew up with a jumble of native and semi native languages including Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew. She began writing poetry and fiction in English as an adult after pursuing a Ph.D. in Linguistics at UC Berkeley. Her poetry has appeared in many places including Abyss & Apex (which published last year’s Rhysling nominated “Odysseus on the War Train”) and Goblin Fruit (which published this year’s Rhysling nominated “Godfather Death”), and her short fiction has appeared in G.U.D., Strange Horizons, and Fantasy Magazine.
Stone Telling is Rose’s newest project, an online magazine devoted to literary speculative poetry. The title is the name of a character from a story by Ursula K. Le Guin, and the first issue will feature a previously unpublished poem by Le Guin. The first reading period opened on the 14th of June, and will close on the 14th of August.
Rose is on LiveJournal and Twitter, and also maintains a Stone Telling LiveJournal community. She is currently a professor at a large research University in the Midwest.
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OA: Stone Telling is open for submissions until the 14th of August. What sorts of poems are you hoping to receive?
RL: I am looking for literary speculative poems with an emotional core. I’d like to receive poems that blow my mind, bend my brain, make me fly, make me cry, and hopefully don’t make me throw up or throw the laptop against the wall. As you can see from the guidelines, I am pretty open genre-wise, style-wise and length-wise. I am a very open-minded reader, but also a very picky one.
Ideally I’d like to regularly showcase poetry that illuminates the experience of being Other, or encountering Others. Speculative poetry, I feel, is a perfect vehicle to deal with othering; real life also offers us plenty of othering experiences, some incredibly painful and some less so. I want to read poems that consider what it means to feel alienated or lonely or different or changing or belonging to a community that’s different from other communities; I want to read about what it means to grow up in a different place, to speak a different language, to think about the world in different colors. However, I am not going to reject poems simply because they do not deal with the issues I list. I will consider all poetry I receive.
OA: Are you actively interested in poetry with LGBTQI themes?
RL: Yes, I very much hope to receive poetry with LGBTQI themes. Please send them to me!
There are some very fine poets already in the genre who are active in the LGBTQI community, whether or not they choose to explore LGBTQI issues in their work. And you don’t have to be a member of the LGBTQI community in order to write poems that explore these themes. One of my first published poems, “Two Births of a Bird Shaman” (in Mythic Delirium 19) dealt with gender change.
OA: What other themes interest you?
RL: Simply put, I am most interested in speculative poems that explore diversity. To give one example not at random, I would very much like to publish poetry that deals with race, and I’d like to see poetry by people of color (whether or not they are writing about race) in my magazine and elsewhere. I am also very much into disability issues.
OA: Why did you decide to start a poetry magazine in the first place?
RL: I first got this idea last year, when Lone Star Stories folded. Journal of Mythic Arts, another beloved market, folded in 2008. I sorely missed both venues, and asked myself what I’d do if I had a chance to launch my own zine. The answer was clear – I would consider a broad range of speculative (and occasionally, outstanding non-speculative) poems, and I would work hard to promote diversity in speculative poetry. But 2009 was such a disastrous year for me, I had to shelve the idea for a better time – and now I feel that the time has come. I was immensely encouraged by the positive responses from the community, and I feel that together we can create something worthwhile.
OA: Like Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Conrad, your first language was not English. Do you think this makes you more mindful of the words you choose when you write in English? Does it influence your writing in other ways?
RL: Absolutely. The multilingual experience is at once very enriching, and very humbling. As a poet, I have been shaped by the multilingual poetry I read, and I learned some of my languages through poetry. The humbling part comes from never quite knowing the right words – so have to I use wrong words, odd words, triangular words, words that smell like linden flowers, words that smell like tar. I can make embarrassing mistakes, so I have to check every word, and that makes me mindful. My imagery and rhythms and associations are an amalgamation of everything I’ve experienced so far, and that experience is foreign everywhere. It’s not a very comfortable personal place, but it is also a place of strength.
OA: “Godfather Death” is a Rhysling nominee in the long form category this year. What drew you to revisit that fairy tale in modern poetry?
RL: That’s quite a story. In December 2008, I banded with Deirdre S. Moen and Josh Moore to run a charity fundraiser, HelpVera, in order to help the speculative author and publisher Vera Nazarian save her home from foreclosure. The fundraiser was nothing short of amazing – there was such an unforgettable outpouring of love and community spirit. As a part of the fundraiser we ran a charity auction, and I auctioned a custom poem there, which was bought by one of my favorite speculative poets, JoSelle Vanderhooft. When I received JoSelle’s prompt, “Godfather Death”, I had a sinking feeling, since I had never before (or since!) written a poem about death. But I knew this was an important theme for JoSelle, so I dutifully sat down to reread the Brothers’ Grimm fairytale. And then the poem just bled itself from my fingers. I had nothing to do with it.
OA: On the Stone Telling website, you list three examples of literary speculative poetry: “The Seven Devils of Central California” by Catherynne Valente, “The Bone Harp Sings Nine Moods” by Shweta Narayan, and “Hungry: Some Ghost Stories” by Samantha Henderson. Who are some of your other favorite poets?
RL: Non-speculative or speculative? I read a lot of poetry and I read poetry in many languages. Some of my favorite poets composed epic poetry, and are anonymous. I love Old Norse and early Icelandic poetry, and my favorite poet in that language is Egill Skallagrímsson, who lived in 10th century Iceland. As an undergraduate, I spent a lot of time translating various Taliesin poems from Welsh for my own entertainment, and I love those. Russian poetry is amazing. I grew up reading Anna Akhmatova and Valeriy Briusov and Mikhail Lomonosov, who was born a poor peasant and became a 18-century polymath – a scientist and a poet and an artist and a linguist, among other things. My favorite Russian poet is Vladimir Mayakovsky. In English… there are too many to list. I love Ted Hughes and Winfred Owen and Elizabeth Bishop. Speculative poets, in addition to those already mentioned? Ursula Le Guin has been an inspiration for everything I do since my early teens, when I first read a Le Guin novel. It was Rocannon’s World and it changed my world. And Ursula Le Guin is a wonderful poet. Jane Yolen, I think that’s a given. And I was just telling a friend how much I love Delia Sherman’s “Snow White to the Prince”, a poem that is true and heartbreaking. And last but not least, Amal El-Mohtar.
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Thanks, Rose! Join us next Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out Rose’s work, and consider submitting something to Stone Telling.
Comments»
Lovely interview! Rose, I don’t know if you’ll see the comments here, but I loved what you said about words, especially words that smell like linden flowers, words that smell like tar –especially since (a) linden flowers are blooming here right now and (b) I had been about to write a poem about tar.
Francesca, thank you very much for your kind words! Also, a) linden flowers are blooming right now here too, which is why I thought of them: I have a wonderful little leaf linden tree in my front yard. and b) please do!
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