Again, many more on Facebook (with commentary too!)

• The new issue of Red Rose Review should be up any moment now and has two poems from me in it :).
• P: Poetry Editor – lovely post by Rhonda Parrish of Niteblade about the awesome Alexandra Seidel (that just happens to mention the poem that Sara Cleto and I published there last year as one of her favorites! Sara’s “The Maiden-Harp” also gets a shout out!)
• I Seem to Have Annoyed You Gentlemen in Some Way – great post by Verity Holloway on dressing how you like.
• Practical Magic: A Victorian House Fit for a Witch – I *love* this house.
• Re-Enchantment – a crazy gorgeous fairy tale website from Australia, amazing artwork!
• Is Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia the Greatest Play of Our Age? – I’m going to go with yes. If you haven’t seen/read this, stop what you’re doing right now and remedy that.
• 30 Things to Tell a Book Snob – excellent.
• Monash University Rare Books Exhibition ‘In Fairy Land’ – so so cool.
• The Great Cauldron of Story: Maria Tatar on Why Fairy Tales are for Adults Again On Being Podcast – I haven’t had a chance to listen to this yet but I am going to asap!
• Folklore Horse Tumblr – :D!

I hope you’re all surviving this busy time of year!

Illustration by Paul Hey

I was also able to attend two fantastic conferences this month: Gothic: Culture, Subculture, Counterculture in London, UK and The International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in Orlando, FL. Both were great and the paper I presented at both seemed to be very well received (which thrills me as it’s a part of my dissertation work!) ICFA has quickly become one of my favorite events of the year, it’s so amazing to get to hang out with so many of my inspirations, both scholarly and creative. The fairy tale people are especially awesome and I’m so happy to know them all!

This month has really been a whirlwind of great news and fun and I feel so lucky right now :).

It’s getting some lovely attention and I’m so proud to be a part of it :). This is completely nerdy but I really freaked out a bit upon seeing my name on the Amazon and Barnes and Noble pages for the book too! The poem I have in it, “The Blue Hour,” is a favorite of mine and I’m so happy it found such a wonderful home. I’m really looking forward to reading the rest of the collection!

Outfit from yesterday, I am an eccentric, dark poet princess! Er, something like that anyway :P.

A few things I’ve been meaning to post about –

* I have officially registered and am going to London again in March for the Gothic: Culture, Subculture, Counterculture conference at first credited Gothic writer Horace Walpole’s own Strawberry Hill House. This is pretty guaranteed to be fantastic. I will be presenting on the poetics of Gothic fairy tales, some preliminary findings from my dissertation research. I also really hope I get to go see this, which I mentioned before :D.

* This is crazy late but I have a bit of flash fiction in the new issue of Scareship! “Sleeping Beauty” themed this time (it’s really surprising I ever write anything else, I have so many SB related ideas floating around in my mind.)

* Some nice tips for the new year :).

* This was great – a mockup of a film in progress for Neil Gaiman’s haunting black cat fable “The Price”

Happy new year all, I hope things are going well so far!

Edited to Add: Folklore Forum has just published my review of The Cloak of Dreams: Chinese Fairy Tales by Béla Balázs (translated and with an introduction by Jack Zipes), a lovely collection of literary fairy tales that I highly recommend. They are quirky little stories with great details and very worth reading!

A few notes -

* First – reunited and it feels so good…

:D! It’s really wonderful to be home for a bit. My birthday was on Monday and I got to celebrate with my family yesterday :).

* I meant to post more about my amazing time at the After Grimm conference but, sadly, I just haven’t had the spare time to do so. I met several lovely people, including more than a few inspirations of mine, and it was completely wonderful in all ways. One of the people I met was Janet Daniels who runs the FairyTaleTastic blog – check out her post about the conference for a few more details too! While we were there I was also lucky enough to get to see two incredible exhibitions, the Writing Britain exhibition at the British Library and the Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde exhibition at the Tate Britain, buy a fabulous Gothic coat in Camden Town, and visit a few of my friend Sara’s favorite haunts in Oxford.

* I also attended the American Folklore Society’s Annual Meeting in October in New Orleans (which is now absolutely among my favorite cities in the world!)… I was going to write about that as well but, again, did not get the chance :(. Just know that I had a great panel with several other fairy tale scholars and it was a really fun time! I went on a witches and vampires and voodoo walking tour, saw a few of the gorgeous original paintings of Kelly Louise Judd in person for the first time in a random awesome gallery we just happened to wander into, ate many beignets, attended the book launch of Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms in which my former professor at GMU, Margaret Yocom, and my friend Jeana Jorgensen each have a fantastic essay, spoke with a bunch of prospective OSU students and hopefully made a good impression, and saw a bunch of excellent papers.

* I’ve had a paper accepted for presentation at The International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts this coming March – huzzah! I attended this conference for the first time last year and it’s awesome, just full of people doing exactly the kind of work that I love. I’m really happy I get to go again this year!

* I set up my classes for the Spring semester and am really excited about them! I’ll be taking a Children’s/YA Lit. class on the “Roots of Fantasy” (aka the folklore, etc. that frequently inspires fantasy literature!) which is just so perfectly up my alley I’m kind of shocked it’s real, an independent study reading course on the 19th Century British Gothic (awesome texts and great dissertation prep), and a teaching apprenticeship class where I shadow a senior professor teaching an introduction to folklore class, a prerequisite before I can teach my own introductory folklore classes. I’m completely psyched about all of these things :P.

* I’m honored to note that the lovely magazine Niteblade nominated the poem that Sara Cleto (the same Sara as above) and I wrote together, “The Second Law of Thermodynamics,” for the Pushcart Prize. It is so kind of them to acknowledge our poem in this special way – thank you!

* Have you seen the Disney princess inspired windows at Herrods? The “Sleeping Beauty” one is absolutely gorgeous as far as I’m concerned, roses and cobwebs = A+!

* Speaking of “Sleeping Beauty,” the wonderful Bryony recently made me aware of this production of Tchaikovsky’s “Sleeping Beauty” ballet – a gothic version!! It’s like my MA thesis in ballet form, crazy. There is a slim chance I may be in the UK during its run next year so please keep your fingers crossed that I can make it happen!

Happy Thanksgiving to those of you in the US and there will hopefully be more posts from me soon!

Ahhh, I am far too awake for how early it is… I recently attended the After Grimm: Fairy Tales and the Art of Storytelling Conference in the UK (more on this soon!) and am now having trouble getting back on Ohio time – I’ve been awake since 5AM or so? Not cool, Britt, there’s far too much to be done for these shenanigans! The early hour fog over my brain makes me disinclined to do anything too productive though so I thought I would make a quick outfit post to document what I wore to my OSU orientation day… I quite liked this one!

Any tips for resetting sleep schedules would be much appreciated – I have always been bad at this and I’m not sure why?

P.S. The poem that Sara Cleto and I wrote is up at Niteblade! Buy the issue to read the whole thing and support a great magazine :).

Columbus is a very cool city – I feel like they are very good at keeping this fact a secret from the rest of the country! I had never given much thought to Columbus before I was applying to PhD programs and when I came to visit I was really surprised at how great it is. They have amazing food, great free or nearly free artistic events, excellent shopping, and beautiful neighborhoods and parks. Plus so many people are so friendly and kind! I keep getting told that this is just the way the whole Midwest is but it’s still quite awesome :).

A couple other items of note –

* My flash fiction piece, “The Song of the Tower” has been published in the September issue of Scareship and my name’s even on the cover for the first time! You can download a PDF of the issue for free on the website. I haven’t had a chance to read through it yet but it looks great, please give this new magazine a look!

* I’ve been added as a contributor to Futuredaze on Goodreads which means I now officially have a Goodreads author page?! That’s ridiculously awesome :).

* I am home! I neglected to mention this here but my family and I went on a cruise throughout the Mediterranean over the past two weeks and it was absolutely amazing :). We visited Spain, France, Italy, Greece, and Turkey and each one was astounding. There will be pictures on Facebook and such at some point I’m sure!

* I have a poem, “The Mermaid’s Winter Song,” in the current issue of inkscrawl! I really love this publication, they only do speculative poems of 10 lines or fewer which makes for some really great, pared down work. I’m very honored to be a part of it!

* My friend Sara Cleto and I co-wrote a poem that will be appearing in the next issue of the awesome Niteblade! It is a “Snow Queen” riff called “The Second Law of Thermodynamics” :).

* I’ve had two fairy tale inspired flash fiction pieces accepted by the new Scareship Magazine, one for their relaunch issue in September and one for their December issue! It seems like it’s going to be a very cool new magazine and I’m quite eager to read what they put together :).

* A poem of mine was accepted to appear in the new collection Futuredaze: An Anthology of YA Science Fiction edited by Hannah Strom-Martin and Erin Underwood!

The book is forthcoming from Underwords Press in February 2013 and was funded by Kickstarter. It really sounds fantastic (the list of contributing authors blows my mind!)

* My PhD studies at OSU start very soon! Orientation is on Monday and I’m so excited/nervous that I’m actually bouncing as I write this post. My to-do list pre-Ohio is about three pages long so I hope I can focus on that instead! I shall attempt to catch up as much with the online world as I can too :).