Shining Moon Episode 13: Speculative Poetry II

Hello, and welcome to Shining Moon: A Speculative Fiction Podcast Episode 13. Today we’ll continue our series by asking questions about speculative poetry before doing a little poetry reading, and then a holding poetry thunderdome.

 My guests today are Brian Hugenbruch and Dawn Vogel.

Brian Hugenbruch can be found at a variety of places online, including:
https://the-lettersea.com
IG: https://www.instagram.com/the_lettersea/ 
Threads:  https://www.threads.net/@the_lettersea
Bluesky:  @the-lettersea.bsky.social
Mastodon:  https://wandering.shop/@the_lettersea
Twitter:  @Bwhugen

Dawn Vogel can be visited at historythatneverwas.com or Blue Sky/Mastodon @historyneverwas. 

"Don't tell me that the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." -- Anton Chekov

Piano music for closure

Thank you for listening to Shining Moon! You can reach the host, Deborah L. Davitt, at the following social media platforms:

www.facebook.com/deborah.davitt.3

Bluesky: @deborahldavitt.bsky.social

www.deborahldavitt.com

Transcript

Deborah L. Davitt:
Hello and welcome to Shining Moon, a speculative fiction podcast episode 13. I'm your host, Deborah L. Davitt. Today we'll continue our series by asking questions about speculative poetry before doing a little poetry reading and then holding a poetry thunderdome. My guests today are Brian Huchenbrook and Dawn Vogel. Let's start with some introductions. Brian Huchenbrook is a speculative fiction author and poet living in upstate New York with his wife and their daughter. He enjoys fishing, but only in video games. scotch but only in real life and he spends his days explaining quantum cryptography to other nerds. His fiction has appeared in analog escape pod and ZNB presents. His poetry has appeared in dreams and nightmares, apparition literary and abyss and apex. No, he's not sure how to say his last name either. Hello, Brian. Thank you for coming back to the podcast. It's a pleasure to have you back on.

Brian Hugenbruch:
Well, thank you very much, Deborah. I'm glad to be back.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Dawn Fogel has written for children, teens, and adults spanning genres, places, and time periods. She is a member of SFWA and Codex Writers. She lives in Seattle with her awesome husband and fellow author, Jeremy Zimmerman, and their cats. Visit her at historythatneverwas.com or on Blue Sky or Mastodon at historyneverwas. Thank you for joining us, Dawn. Nice to have you on.

Dawn V:
Thanks for having me, this is going to be fun!

Deborah L. Davitt:
I'm really hoping it will be. The Thunderdome almost always comes up with some surprisingly good results. People always think, oh, I can't write anything good in two minutes. And then they pop out with these profound things. And I'm like, where were you hiding that? All right, let's start with, we already covered this on the first podcast, but what is speculative poetry to you? How does it differ from literary poetry and your approach to it? And... uh and your definition of it and I'll start with Brian

Brian Hugenbruch:
Aw man.

Deborah L. Davitt:
He he!

Brian Hugenbruch:
And I wasn't expecting to go first on that one. But I would say that speculative poetry is more, I've always felt that it's more marketing than it is an actual term. I think poetry is poetry. And that

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yes.

Brian Hugenbruch:
certainly it has its own language that comes with it as any genre content would. but I think it still latches on to emotional court truths the way that quote unquote literary or normal poetry would. So I think people don't need to be scared of it. It's just, and I wouldn't call it a sonnet with spaceships, but it's perhaps a little bit more profound than that. But it helps to explore some interesting ideas that maybe mere mortal today's language wouldn't necessarily be able to cover.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Okay, I like that. Dawn, how about you? How

Dawn V:
Um,

Deborah L. Davitt:
do you approach it?

Dawn V:
so for me, I think that my speculative poems are the ones that have something in them that might not qualify as real. And that could be something, you know, sci-fi, could be something fantasy, could be a monster, could be a cat that talks, who knows what. But honestly, there's not that much difference. to me either between what speculative poetry and literary poetry are. I think that I've read some literary poems that definitely felt speculative to me and vice versa. So

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Dawn V:
I don't have much of a different approach between the way that I tackle each one. I like writing speculative poetry better because I think it's more fun, but

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Dawn V:
I don't really change the way I look at poetry depending on... whether I'm doing speculative or literary.

Deborah L. Davitt:
All right, that's fair enough. Why do you write poetry, Dawn?

Dawn V:
Um, I stumbled into it on accident, honestly. Um, and,

Deborah L. Davitt:
So say we all.

Dawn V:
and then I figured out that it was actually a fun way to tell a story in a small space, which I love doing. I love flash fiction and

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Dawn V:
drabbles and all that. So I could tell a story in a small space and I could leave out some of the. conventions of stories. For example, I don't have to use dialogue in a poem if I don't want to. I can, but I don't have to. And so there's ways, there are some stories I think that just for me come out better as poetry than they would if I tried to write them narratively. And so, you know, if I get an idea, I can look at it and poetry gives me another option in my toolbox of writing of you know, instead of doing a short story or a flash or a drabble, I can say, or a poem.

Deborah L. Davitt:
right? I like that answer because I stumbled into poetry very much by accident myself, so um I feel you there. Brian, why do you write poetry?

Brian Hugenbruch:
Same basic idea, slightly different approach. A long time ago I was a mopey teenager.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Hahaha.

Brian Hugenbruch:
Long, long time ago. And that's where my poetry started. And as a result of that, it took a long time before I got into narrative poetry, despite reading Beowulf and spending a lot of time with the Romantics and the Victorians in high school and college. followed Poe's philosophy of composition and figured poetry was there to evoke an emotional response and I was there to drive daggers home and pull teeth and do all kinds of nasty things with my iambic pantameter.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Hmm

Brian Hugenbruch:
So

Deborah L. Davitt:
hmm

Brian Hugenbruch:
yeah, over time as I've gotten better at both fiction and poetry, those things have merged slightly. I've learned how to use both sides of that toolbox a little bit more proficiently. so that you don't have to rely merely on vibes when crafting poetry. But I'm definitely not shy about using them or just letting the vibes marinate on their own without having to inflict a story upon it.

Deborah L. Davitt:
that. I tend to approach things more like Dawn said, as a story that might not merit a full novella or a novel or something like that. But it's an idea that I wanted to get out and things like that. So it's been harder for me to do more of the lyric poetry. And because to me, well, of course, everything's a story. Everything's a story. And so getting it into my head that it cannot be a story, it can be a vignette, it can be a single expression of a single emotion, and it's still a thing is like, but where's the rest of it, at least where I'm at, so it's something I'm still working on as a poet. Where are some favorite places of yours that you've found speculative poetry in the wild? Brian, some favorite venues.

Brian Hugenbruch:
So running alongside of college, I think Strange Horizons debuted on the web not very long after. So I kind of graduated from the quote unquote classics into something completely different. And so moving from that into places like Penumbrake or Apparition Literary or some of the other Specfic venues. I also keep tabs on the quote unquote literary side by looking

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Brian Hugenbruch:
at Rattle you know, Poetry Magazine even, just to see how the other half lives.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yeah. Oh, if only to be only to be able to appear in those pages

Dawn V:
Hehehe

Deborah L. Davitt:
one day.

Brian Hugenbruch:
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt:
I keep trying but they keep not biting.

Brian Hugenbruch:
Mm.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Dawn, some favorite places of yours?

Dawn V:
I really enjoy Starline. I've had a few poems published there and I love the zine feel of the publication and they send it to you when you're in it and then I can flip through and read all these other people's poems.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Dawn V:
I also like Eye to the Telescope, especially with their themes. And then on the slightly more literary side, like Brian said, Apparition

Brian Hugenbruch:
Mmm.

Dawn V:
They do a speculative literary issue, I think, once a year. And then they also have,

Deborah L. Davitt:
check this out.

Dawn V:
yeah, they also have literary issues. I think they do three issues a year maybe, and like two are literary and one is literary speculative. And so they have a nice mix in those literary speculative issues that I like. And then of course, the big ones, you know, the Strange Horizons and the Uncanny and Asimovs and Analog and yeah. All those.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yeah, I tend to at the end of the year when people send out their poetry packets saying these are all the things that they wrote during the course of the year, then it's like, I get to gulp down everybody's distilled that like like, it's like reading an anthology of you.

Dawn V:
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt:
I get to read all your stuff at the end of the year. And so it's all in one place. And then I can just go through and go Yeah, you guys are awesome. You guys rock. Do you have any collections or chapbooks that you might want people to read? Either of you, because I know that you're both a little on the newer side to poetry, but I know you are shopping some, Brian, but I don't know that you have any out that people can read.

Brian Hugenbruch:
I don't have any out yet, so while I have a few that I want people to read, they can't yet.

Deborah L. Davitt:
He he!

Brian Hugenbruch:
So keep your fingers crossed and certainly

Deborah L. Davitt:
Oh yes.

Brian Hugenbruch:
I'll post something to my own website and announce it all over the web as soon as something sells on that score.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yeah, I am definitely keeping my fingers crossed for you because most of your collections sound like they are awesome and like things that I would want to read. So, and Dawn, how about you?

Dawn V:
I don't have any traditionally published chapbooks, but I did put together a collection that I self-published called What If I'm a Merfolk? And it is

Deborah L. Davitt:
Ha ha!

Dawn V:
mostly poetry with a few flash fiction and maybe one short story all about merfolk. There's a art challenge every May called Mermaid, where

Deborah L. Davitt:
Okay.

Dawn V:
artists do 2D drawings of merfolk. of various sorts with various prompts, I take those prompts and I use them to write. And so one year I did

Deborah L. Davitt:
Nice.

Dawn V:
mostly poetry for Mermaid and then I picked out my favorite ones from that year, put those together with a couple other little pieces that I had and that's where What If I'm a Merfolk came from. And then I toss poetry into my other collections as well, but that's the only one that is primarily poetry so far.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Where can people find that one?

Dawn V:
On my website, historythatneverwas.com, it's sold on basically all of the major retailers, but you can get to that and my other publications just straight from the front page of my website.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Okay, fantastic. All right, let's go ahead and shift gears a little bit and you can show us what you can do when you have all the time in the world to write a poem that you are proud of and that you think that people will enjoy. And I'm gonna do this in alphabetical order and pick on Brian first. Please tell us the name of your poem, where people can read it, and go ahead and read it for us.

Brian Hugenbruch:
Okay, so this poem appeared in the late lamented Liminality magazine.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Oh, I missed that one.

Brian Hugenbruch:
Yeah, and it is actually my very first published poem and it's called Tomorrow's Moments. I met an admin from an antique LAN who said, two webcams point into a room gone mad. We don't know where it is nor who configured it. The floor is littered, cans, chips, cigarettes devoid of breath. Upon the wall a banner hangs, spring break 09. The feed is live and yes, the frame rate's fine. The bodies on the floor we linger on. Their limbs are gone. Their pallid flesh decays on video, their lifeless eyes regard the comments coolly, but for all the far-flung chatter, dead and motionless they stay. 100 million strangers watch and pray and cannot help and cannot look away.

Dawn V:
Wow,

Deborah L. Davitt:
That one's dark. Ha ha

Dawn V:
I like it.

Deborah L. Davitt:
ha! Yeah. All right, Dawn, what is your one that you wanna have today?

Dawn V:
So the poem I have is The Whale, Sharks, Stars, which was published in Strange Horizons in I think August or September, not too long ago, so you can still read it on their website. And this one is an interlocking rubyiat. So

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Dawn V:
it's the first time I attempted that form and I liked how it turned out and Strange Horizons bought it, so I was like, win-win.

Deborah L. Davitt:
No.

Dawn V:
Vast ripples flow across the cosmic lights, and in their wake, the newest stars shine bright. The scientists unsure whence they were formed, when spotted by the distant satellites. In laboratories filled with well-informed, astronomers, the science minds brainstorm, content at first to watch it from afar, astonished when the source is a life form. A whale shark larger than a full hectare. its spotted skin resembling the stars, a swimming leaving new ones in its wake, a Pleiades-like map of Zanzibar. They marvel at the beauty that it makes, though logic makes them do a double take. This should not be. It makes no sense, this light. The stately stars they see are no mistake.

Brian Hugenbruch:
Thank

Deborah L. Davitt:
Very

Brian Hugenbruch:
you.

Deborah L. Davitt:
nice. Love the imagery.

Dawn V:
Thank you.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Brian, where did you get your inspiration for your poem? Where did it and why did you decide to write it in the form that you did?

Brian Hugenbruch:
So, I mean, the obvious point of inspiration is Ozymandias by Percy Shelley,

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Brian Hugenbruch:
which would later go on to inspire me to play a lot with golden shovels

Deborah L. Davitt:
Thank

Brian Hugenbruch:
in other

Deborah L. Davitt:
you.

Brian Hugenbruch:
poems. So having the reference there was just kind of a fun nod, and that's where it started. But this idea of exploring... horror through poetry, which maybe my very first formative experience with poetry is reading Porfiri is a Lover by Robert Browning. And watching the enjambment on that just really drive the stick right into your eye with your expectations skewered at the end of it. So having the idea of horror and social media obsession combined into a sonnet format and that love of horror and that love of horror. love of obsessing just really seemed to gel very quickly for me and it turned out not too badly.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yeah, I liked it. I really did. I thought that particularly the ending just landed really, really hard. So kudos on that because getting things to land in such a way that it rocks the audience like that is much more difficult than it sounds.

Brian Hugenbruch:
Thank you.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Dawn, where did you get the inspiration for yours and why did you decide on the interlocking RubiYacht?

Dawn V:
So most of the inspiration for mine was learning about whale sharks, which they have a star-like pattern on their skin. And

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Dawn V:
the idea of a whale in space is sort of a little bit of a Doctor Who reference, but also just doing sort of my own thing with it. I think I decided to do this as an interlocking ruby at because I hadn't tried that form before and I wanted to and When I started playing around with it I had words that I could find easy rhymes for but also interesting rhymes for and rhyming is one of the skills in poetry that I Have a little bit of trouble with because I feel like a lot of the time my rhymes come across as very like grade school sounding But so finding a way to use larger words and in interesting ways and some slant rhymes was really fun.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Dawn V:
So I liked playing with the format. I'll probably do it again. But this one just sort of turned out and everything worked. And I was like, okay.

Deborah L. Davitt:
you were reading it, it was it was beautifully read and the rhyme did not come across as forced at all. Everything flowed beautifully. So it I can see why Strange Horizon snapped this one up. It was gorgeous.

Dawn V:
Thanks.

Deborah L. Davitt:
All right, so now we're going to shift gears into the main event, which is Poetry Thunderdome. We're gonna do five rounds. The first four rounds are gonna be given two minutes each, which will be snipped out for broadcast purposes. Two minutes each to write the best poem you can in a very short amount of time. Then on the last one, we're gonna luxuriate in the five minutes of time we're gonna have. And you're gonna think that you have so much extra time and you might actually get to the end and go, hey, Deborah, we're done.

Dawn V:
Hehehehe

Deborah L. Davitt:
The idea is already down. In which case I'll say, okay, point taken. And we'll stop the timer and move on. All right, so the way we play this is, I'm gonna ask you first, do you wanna do noun verb adjective or person place thing first?

Dawn V:
I like person place thing.

Brian Hugenbruch:
Yeah, sure.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Okay. All right, Dawn, pick a number between one and 30.

Dawn V:
12.

Deborah L. Davitt:
12 is a gambler. Brian, pick a number between 1 and 30.

Brian Hugenbruch:
23.

Deborah L. Davitt:
23 is Lake Baikal. Do you know where Lake Baikal is?

Dawn V:
I do not.

Brian Hugenbruch:
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt:
It is one of the world's largest freshwater lakes. It is in Russia. And when it freezes over in winter, it is spectacularly beautiful. All right, and a thing. I'm going to close my eyes and say 17. a rubber ducky. So we have a gambler, lake bike haul, and a rubber ducky. Do you guys want me to play along with you?

Dawn V:
Absolutely.

Brian Hugenbruch:
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt:
No idea what I'm gonna come up with for this. This is gonna be crazy. All right, one more time. A gambler, lake bike haul, and a rubber ducky. Begin. All right, that's two minutes. Everybody happy with their first efforts? I'm not.

Dawn V:
I got about half done.

Brian Hugenbruch:
I don't know what just happened.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Hahaha

Dawn V:
Have you done this before, Brian?

Brian Hugenbruch:
Uh, no, no.

Dawn V:
Okay, this is actually my second time doing Thunderdome, so I know you gotta write fast.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Brian, you want to lead us off?

Brian Hugenbruch:
Uh, yeah, I better. That way.

Deborah L. Davitt:
I'm

Brian Hugenbruch:
Let's

Deborah L. Davitt:
sorry.

Brian Hugenbruch:
get it out of the way.

Dawn V:
I'm sorry.

Brian Hugenbruch:
OK. Ice latches onto childhood, gripping ducks and dinosaurs of hugs of stasis, unbending, unyielding, and random nasty chance cannot say whether yellow duck or sweet canary childhood will ever swim again.

Deborah L. Davitt:
That's lovely! How'd you do that in two minutes?

Brian Hugenbruch:
I believe that desperation.

Dawn V:
Hahaha!

Deborah L. Davitt:
I'm sorry. Dawn, you wanna go next?

Dawn V:
Sure, and like I said, I've got about half of this done, but I know where I'm going with it. But

Deborah L. Davitt:
That's a good thing.

Dawn V:
what I have so far is, they say the thaw won't come for weeks. They prove it by putting things on the ice. Sticks, cardboard boxes, children's toys. A rubber ducky joined soon after by dozens more. But one man thinks he can beat them all. A car, he suggests. Engines out, seats out, and that's all the further I got.

Brian Hugenbruch:
Uh...

Deborah L. Davitt:
I

Brian Hugenbruch:
Uh-huh.

Deborah L. Davitt:
can see where that's going. I like that.

Dawn V:
Yeah, if you're familiar with Neil Gaiman's American Gods, that's the inspiration

Brian Hugenbruch:
I was wondering

Dawn V:
there.

Brian Hugenbruch:
if that was

Dawn V:
Yup.

Brian Hugenbruch:
in there somewhere.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Okay, well, you can definitely play with that one and finish that

Dawn V:
Oh

Deborah L. Davitt:
one

Dawn V:
yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt:
out. All right, so mine is not nearly as good as Brian's and while it's complete, I'm not sure it's good.

Dawn V:
Hehehe

Deborah L. Davitt:
So a rubber ducky, some of the flotsam of human existence, the trash, the detritus of the early 21st century, floated in the otherwise pristine waters of Lake Baikal. It couldn't have been guessed that a gambler would have found it. The odds were long against its presence in his net. and he wondered from where it had come and to what child it had once belonged back in the days when plastics were common and the world was a dirtier place than it was now.

Dawn V:
Nice.

Brian Hugenbruch:
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt:
I'm gonna call that one Solar Punk and call it done.

Dawn V:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that one is a great example too of one that could be a story. Like the introduction,

Deborah L. Davitt:
Exactly.

Dawn V:
the

Brian Hugenbruch:
Mm-hmm.

Dawn V:
first few lines made me really think story.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yeah, I had no idea where it was going. I just kept writing. So it's at the Thunderdome is great for getting into that flow state just out of pure desperation, as Brian was saying.

Dawn V:
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt:
So we're going to switch to noun verb adjective for this next one. I'm going to ask Dawn to start us off with picking a number between one and 30.

Dawn V:
Oh, let's see. Let's go with 25.

Deborah L. Davitt:
25 is a dealer. Brian, 130.

Brian Hugenbruch:
for.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Correspond. And I'm gonna close my eyes and say 30. And that is gonna be the word onerous. This is gonna be hard.

Dawn V:
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt:
So again, I'm gonna give you a moment to think, dealer, correspond, and onerous. Two minutes beginning now. And pencils down. How are we feeling about that one?

Brian Hugenbruch:
less confident.

Deborah L. Davitt:
I'm sorry.

Dawn V:
I finished this time.

Deborah L. Davitt:
then we're gonna start with you, Dawn.

Dawn V:
All right. It's hard to play cards by mail, the onerous correspondence, never remembering who dealt this crap, waiting months for your turn. But for the war vets, it's a window of social interaction in the otherwise bleak nothingness of space.

Deborah L. Davitt:
I love that one, that is perfect. All right, Brian, you want to startle and shock us with how good this one is?

Brian Hugenbruch:
I'd love to, but instead here's my poem.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Hahaha!

Brian Hugenbruch:
They put the first two down in front of me. Don't count the cards, I tell myself repeatedly. Don't count the cards. The patterns waft around me, spider webs, fractal light, and magic math. Don't count the cards. There's nothing more onerous than drawing parallels and nothing more frightening than the end of every equation.

Dawn V:
Nice.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Oh, you landed that one hard. Good job.

Dawn V:
The don't count the cards refrain was excellent. I like that a lot.

Brian Hugenbruch:
Thank you.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Alright, mine I finished early, but I don't know if it's any good. It was an onerous correspondence kept up long distance between the stars, light years between himself and his wife. Daily complaints dwindled, the words I loved you, I love you diminished. Until time, the dealer of all dismay, reduced them both to silence and decay.

Dawn V:
Dark, but nice.

Brian Hugenbruch:
He didn't know if that was good.

Dawn V:
Hehehehehehe.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Hahahaha Well, it was definitely not as good as yours was.

Brian Hugenbruch:
I have doubts.

Deborah L. Davitt:
All right, we're gonna switch back to noun, verb, adjective. I'm sorry, person, place, and thing. And I'm gonna ask Brian to start us off with a number between one and 30. Seven is a carpenter. Dawn?

Dawn V:
11.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Eleven is Las Vegas.

Dawn V:
This is what we need a dealer for.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yes we did! I'm going to go with 29 and that's going to be a goblet. So a carpenter, Las Vegas, and a goblet. I have no idea what we're gonna do with this one. Right! Starting now. All right. 

Oh, I'm gonna go ahead and start this time. I don't know what this one wants to be. I think it wants to be longer, but I don't know where it's going. The tarot deck showed all cups, goblets full of coins, and a poker game in Vegas attended by a carpenter who claimed he was Christ. The tarot deck showed all cups, and the plastic cups were filled with quarters as the tourists ventured out blinded by an unearthly light. I think it wants to be longer. I think it needs more of a point to it, but I don't know.

Dawn V:
It's got a Vegas feel though.

Brian Hugenbruch:
Mm, yeah, yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yeah, I grew up in Reno, so I know how to do that much at least. All right, Brian, why don't you go ahead and go for it now?

Brian Hugenbruch:
Okay. Liquid neon fills the cup of a carpenter, a storm's eye soon gone.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Ooh, haiku'd.

Brian Hugenbruch:
Mm.

Dawn V:
Nice.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Dawn?

Dawn V:
All right. They feast on platters of gold, drink from goblets of silver, recline in chairs covered in velvet. It's business as usual at Caesar's Palace, and I'm just the carpenter, reduced shoving shims under slot machines and roulette tables. It pays the bill, making sure the house always wins.

Deborah L. Davitt:
I like the ending!

Brian Hugenbruch:
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt:
All right, this is gonna be our fourth round, which is our last round of two minutes. We're gonna go back to noun verb adjective, Dawn, lead us off with one to 30.

Dawn V:
Let's do one!

Deborah L. Davitt:
Abattoir.

Dawn V:
Boo hoo hoo.

Deborah L. Davitt:
and Brian.

Brian Hugenbruch:
19.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Anticipate. and I'm gonna close my eyes and say five. Third. Abattoir third and anticipate. I can go with Abattoir and Anticipate, but Third is throwing me for a loop. Beginning now. All right. Oh, that one sucked. That one sucked.

Dawn V:
I want to do something with an abattoir that isn't what I just wrote.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Likewise,

Dawn V:
Hehehe

Deborah L. Davitt:
I am not happy with this one, but do you want to lead us off, Dawn?

Dawn V:
Sure. The drop gets you every time. Is it at the end of a hangman's noose? Is it the feeling of falling when you're drifting to sleep, but this time you really fall? Or is it the abattoir, an oubliette of death and decay, you just waiting your turn?

Deborah L. Davitt:
like it. I see you didn't manage to get third in but I that was really hard.

Dawn V:
My goal was to make it the third option, so the third option was where the

Deborah L. Davitt:
Okay.

Dawn V:
abattoir

Brian Hugenbruch:
Hmm.

Dawn V:
was.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Fantastic.

Dawn V:
Yeah, I didn't use the actual words except for abattoir this time.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Okay, I like what you did then.

Brian Hugenbruch:
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt:
And I liked the imagery and I thought that it was effective and you did some craft stuff that I didn't spot, which is really cool. All right, Brian.

Brian Hugenbruch:
I don't regret the second time I died. A fall from feral heights aloft until a sudden end. The wind, it rushed around me, filling life with sound and meaningless excitement. I walked away. But the third, I was cremated. And much as I would like, there is no coming back from that.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Oof.

Brian Hugenbruch:
Needs a little bit more room, but...

Deborah L. Davitt:
It needs more room, but it's a good beginning.

Dawn V:
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt:
I think that one's got some legs that can be explored.

Brian Hugenbruch:
Mm.

Deborah L. Davitt:
don't like mine.

Dawn V:
Hehehehehehe

Deborah L. Davitt:
On the third day the abattoir was empty of animals, I couldn't anticipate what would come next that they would come for us the humans and direct us under the flensing knives that leaped and danced in silver and red. And the blood the rich blood fell to a floor slippery when wet. On the evening of the third day the abattoir was again empty this time of all wives.

Dawn V:
There's some really good stuff there. So it's

Brian Hugenbruch:
Uh-huh.

Dawn V:
just a matter of massaging it and taking more time

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yeah,

Dawn V:
with it, I think.

Deborah L. Davitt:
I think so. And so our next round is going to be the five minute round, which of course will be edited out and will just will sound so brilliant

Dawn V:
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt:
when we come back from our little our little 10 second break. And people will go wow, that's so much better than the last couple of

Dawn V:
Hahaha

Deborah L. Davitt:
rounds, at least I

Brian Hugenbruch:
I'm

Deborah L. Davitt:
really

Brian Hugenbruch:
going to go.

Deborah L. Davitt:
hope that that's what happens. All right, it's going to be person place and thing Brian lead us off.

Brian Hugenbruch:
Let's see, what haven't we picked yet?

Dawn V:
Oh, you've been keeping track good.

Brian Hugenbruch:
Let's go with the

Deborah L. Davitt:
Oh, I'll tell you if it's something

Dawn V:
Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt:
that you've already picked.

Brian Hugenbruch:
number six.

Deborah L. Davitt:
The number six is a minor.

Brian Hugenbruch:
Is that with

Deborah L. Davitt:
Like

Brian Hugenbruch:
an

Deborah L. Davitt:
it,

Brian Hugenbruch:
E

Deborah L. Davitt:
that's

Brian Hugenbruch:
or no?

Deborah L. Davitt:
an E.

Brian Hugenbruch:
Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt:
All right, done.

Dawn V:
Um, I feel like maybe eight?

Deborah L. Davitt:
Eight, you're making this too easy. It's gonna be Mars.

Dawn V:
Nice.

Deborah L. Davitt:
And I'm going to close my eyes and say 13. Ah, that made it hard again, a snail.

Dawn V:
Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt:
a miner on Mars and a snail. And let me adjust my clock here so that it's more than two minutes. and begin. Alright, it's time. How do we feel about the longer time period this time?

Dawn V:
I wrote more words, but it just let me dream bigger, and I didn't finish.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Brian, how about you?

Brian Hugenbruch:
I, uh, she took my answer.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Hahaha! Alright, I'll lead off because I actually finished early and

Dawn V:
Nice.

Deborah L. Davitt:
I probably should have had more time to play with it, but... Alright. I mark the claim, file it with the Martian colonial government as mine, but I'll ultimately abandon it. There's just no time for luxury items and riches, not when tomorrow's survival is at stake. And, like a snail, I crawl on my rover to the next likely spot, the next field of dreams, and start the core sampler looking for something that's actually worth digging for. It's not very poetic, but it's a story.

Dawn V:
Yeah?

Brian Hugenbruch:
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Brian, can you do better?

Brian Hugenbruch:
Um, sources say no,

Dawn V:
Hehehe

Brian Hugenbruch:
but let's

Deborah L. Davitt:
Hahaha!

Brian Hugenbruch:
take a look. Red world's light drifts slowly, a snail across the barren rock. Badlands long pass salvation. The war, or the myth of it, makes the land more angry. The rover scuttles over broken stone, selecting samples. Subroutines set to prey if anger ever present is revisited upon it. But samples it must find, because its Martian masters asked it nicely. And while this

Deborah L. Davitt:
Hehehe

Brian Hugenbruch:
broken husk, this wasted earth, was scary, to a rover's subroutines. Its master said that nothing lived to herd it in this place. Only fear, which all provided ample samples for its subroutines. A rock falls in an unknown distance. Wind or time or something else. A morbid, monstrous earth now. And that's where I ran out of time.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Oh my god! Are you writing this by hand or are you typing?

Brian Hugenbruch:
I'm writing all this by hand, which if I were typing, I'd be in a whole lot more trouble because it would have gone further.

Dawn V:
Hehehehe

Deborah L. Davitt:
Dawn, I know you're writing yours by hand because I was watching.

Dawn V:
Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt:
And do you feel that that's helping you or hurting you at the moment?

Dawn V:
Um, I feel like at least here I'm getting my ideas, even if I end up crossing them out, they're here. And so I think that when I take these things to revise, which I plan on doing, I think I'm going to end up like being able to sort of follow my thought process a little bit better because it's on paper. Whereas if I were typing it, I'd just be like deleting lines and then they're gone forever.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yep. All right, well, lay it on us. What did you come up with that would let you dream big?

Dawn V:
Well, so I didn't quite get to the end of where I wanted to. I got to an end, but not quite fully where I wanted. And I realized as I was working on it that I, when I do sci-fi poems about actually extant planets, I need to do a lot of research while I'm writing and didn't

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yes.

Dawn V:
have the ability to do that. So if I screwed up something about Mars's geology, I'll have to fix it in post.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Hahaha

Dawn V:
The drill leaves a spiraling trail down into the red rocks, turning in on itself like a fractal. The miner stops at the limit of the drill, but nothing has come from the hole. No water, no precious metals, not even a change in the stratigraphy, red all the way down. She moves the drill to the next coordinates, auguring another hole. By morning, colonists surround the holes, peering inside like they're divining something in the clay. And that's where I got to.

Deborah L. Davitt:
I love where this was.

Brian Hugenbruch:
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt:
This is the beginning of something great. I want to read the rest of it now.

Brian Hugenbruch:
Well, quick, let's

Deborah L. Davitt:
Alright.

Brian Hugenbruch:
give her another 12 minutes.

Dawn V:
It's going to take a little longer than that. I'm going to have to read at least three Wikipedia articles before I can finish.

Deborah L. Davitt:
I know that feeling very well. I felt like I was cheating because I almost always pick Cydonia as the region where I start

Dawn V:
Mmm.

Deborah L. Davitt:
things in Mars. So I'm like, that's easy to remember and I can just go from there. But all right. Do any do either of you have anything that recently came out or that it will be coming out soon? It can be prose as well as poetry that you'd like to talk about that people should totally read.

Dawn V:
can go ahead and go. So yeah, my most recent poem out was The Whale Shark Stars. I do have two poems accepted by Asimov's. I don't have publication dates for those yet, but they will be here at some point. I've seen the proofs on the first one, so I suspect it's going to be in the November-December issue, but I don't know that for certain.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Congrats!

Dawn V:
Aside

Brian Hugenbruch:
Yeah.

Dawn V:
from that, I have a self-published collection of my short stories and one poem that are alternate history or what I like to call fantastical history where I inject supernatural or speculative elements into actual history. And then I write an essay about the actual history that I'm warping. And this is

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Dawn V:
going to be the third volume of those. It's called Unfixed Timelines 3. And it comes out October 17. I am also putting out the same day an omnibus edition of the first three volumes that will collect them all

Deborah L. Davitt:
Woo!

Dawn V:
into a print book because the previous volumes have been really, really slim and they haven't made enough for a print book, but this one's going to be a big, chunky like 250 page book now.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Nice! Brian, anything out recently or coming up soon?

Brian Hugenbruch:
Yeah, well, not quite as much, but I have two poems coming out this month. One will be in Space and Time, which

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Brian Hugenbruch:
will be artificial intelligence related, but certainly not artificial intelligence crafted. One will be in Penelbrick Speculative also this month. And I have a longer form short story, Prose, appearing in the water. Water Dragon publishing a Dragon Gems anthology for fall 2023.

Dawn V:
Congratulations!

Deborah L. Davitt:
Very nice.

Brian Hugenbruch:
Thank you.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Nice to hear that somebody got into that one.

Dawn V:
Yeah!

Deborah L. Davitt:
I did not submit, but I've been watching people go, rejected, rejected.

Dawn V:
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt:
And I was wondering if anybody had gotten in. So I'm glad to see that someone has, and that is you. All right, thank you both for having agreed to be on the podcast. It was a delight getting to speak with both of you and to getting to play a Thunderdome with you. It's wonderful to watch how people's minds work. So thank you very much. Next week on Shining Moon, we'll finally get to talk to editors Eleanor R. Wood and Shingai Njeri Kagunda of Podcastle. We will be talking about obviously editors and editing. We will see you then. Thank you all and we're out.