Month: October 2020

The Sealey Challenge 2020

John Winkelman

The Sealey Challenge for 2020 is complete. 31 poetry books and chapbooks in 31 days. These are the books, in the order in which I read them. I listed them on Instagram and Twitter as I read them, but this is the the first and only photo of all of the books in one place. According to the statistics at Library Thing I have just over 270 poetry books and chapbooks in my library, and the 31 I read over the past month have put a significant dent in my TBR pile.

Traditionally the Sealey Challenge is held in August, so I have eight months to collect 30 more poetry books so I can go into the challenge with a new stack of unread material. Or maybe I will just hit a few used book stores and buy 30 back issues of Poetry magazine, since each issue is essentially a good-sized anthology of contemporary poetry.

I regrettably do not have any books by Nicole Sealey, the founder of The Sealey Challenge, but I hope to remedy that before the end of this year.

Here is the list of titles, in reading order, with links to the author’s information pages:

2020.10.01 – Rogin-Roper, Leah – Two Truths and a Lie
2020.10.02 – Danos, Stephen – Missing Slides
2020.10.03 – Mandelstam, Osip – Voronezh Notebooks
2020.10.04 – Almeida, Alexis – I Have Never Been Able to Sing
2020.10.05 – Kaneko, W. Todd – This Is How the Bone Sings
2020.10.06 – Coolidge, Sarah (ed.) – Home: New Arabic Poetry
2020.10.07 – Cooper, Wyn – Chaos Is the New Calm
2020.10.08 – ortiz, mónica teresa – autobiography of a semiromantic anarchist
2020.10.09 – Brace, Kristin – The Farthest Dreaming Hill
2020.10.10 – de Alba, Cassandra – habitats
2020.10.11 – Le Guin, Ursula – Wild Angels
2020.10.12 – Matthews, Airea D. – Simulacra
2020.10.13 – Rogal, Lisa – Feed Me Weird Things
2020.10.14 – Amezcua, Eloisa– On Not Screaming
2020.10.15 – Stafford, William – My Name is William Tell
2020.10.16 – Stack, Garrett – Yeoman’s Work
2020.10.17 – Brandt, Emily – Sleeptalk or Not At All
2020.10.18 – Olszewska, Daniela – Answering Machine
2020.10.19 – Marinovich, Filip – Wolfman Librarian
2020.10.20 – Harris, Joseph – Logically Thinking
2020.10.21 – Harrison, Jim – Collected Ghazals
2020.10.22 – Bettis, Christine – Burnout Paradise
2020.10.23 – Gleason, Rachel – New Kind of Rebellion
2020.10.24 – Khayyam, Omar – The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
2020.10.25 – Cáceres, Omar – Defense of the Idol
2020.10.26 – Chang, Kristin – Past Lives, Future Bodies
2020.10.27 – Goff, Nichole – Aluminum Necropolis
2020.10.28 – Gurton-Wachter, Anna – Blank Blank Blues
2020.10.29 – Burns, Megan – Sleepwalk With Me
2020.10.30 – Trier-Walker, Amy Jo – Trembling Ourselves Into Trees
2020.10.31 – Harrison, Jim – Letters to Yesenin

And now, time to put down the poetry books and pick up the pen for National Novel Writing Month, which starts in just under six hours.

October’s Waning Daylight

John Winkelman

The slide from October to November continues, accompanied by a rapid reduction in both daylight and warm outdoor air. I can no longer sit outside for an hour every morning before work and read and write without being attacked by Poe the Ricochet Kitten. I must now take frequent breaks to play with her lest she make of my toes a sampling of ors d’eouvres.

Just a small stack of new reading material this past week. On the left is the November issue of Poetry. On the right is Harmada, the latest work from Joao Gilberto Noll, published in translation by Two Lines Press.

Writing has fallen by the wayside due to upheavals in my personal life, though I have thought through the narrative blockage in the book and should be ready to hit the ground running on November 1. In reading news I am keeping up the pace for the Sealey Challenge and with six days left and reading list planned out I will easily make it to the end, assuming certain looming family issues don’t come crashing down before the end of the month.

That’s all for now. 2020 is the gift that just keeps on giving.

Re-centering Poetry

John Winkelman

One of the advantages, if you can call it that, of working at home in the Days of COVID is that I can see the day-to-day progression of the diminishing daylight as we move from the autumnal equinox to the winter solstice. When I close down my laptop at the end of my shift the sun is just a little closer to the horizon, the light a little more golden – or red, depending on the drift of smoke from the west coast. And each day it is just a little more difficult to pull myself from bed early enough in the morning to complete my morning routine.

Two things are helping keep me on my game as winter approaches: Poe, who still insists on being fed at 5:00 every morning, and a large stack of poetry books and chapbooks to read through as part of the Sealey Challenge. I am managing to stay on schedule, mostly thanks to a large pile of unread chapbooks which have arrived over the past four years as part of my subscriptions to Horse Less Press (currently on indefinite hiatus) and Ugly Duckling Presse, which is still going strong though I had to let my subscription lapse for financial reasons. I note that traditionally the Sealey Challenge has run during the month of August, so next year I will align myself with the rest of the poetry universe and complete the challenge in the appropriate month.

An excellent pile of books arrived this week at the Library of Winkelman Abbey. On the top left is a new one from Subterranean Press – Edited By, a collection of stories which have been edited by Ellen Datlow. The collection itself is, well, edited by Ellen Datlow. So there’s a lot of meta going on with this one.

In the top middle is Francesco Verso‘s Nexhuman, the latest delivery from Apex Book Company, to which I have a subscription through Patreon. Editor Jason Sizemore was kind enough to reach out to me when the original print run for this shipment ran a few short and he allowed me to pick any title from the Apex catalog. This was my first choice, and it was fortunate they had copies in stock, as I am slowly picking up every book Apex has published, thanks to Patreon, Kickstarter, and purchases at various ConFusions over the past several years.

On the top right is Road to Heaven, Bill Porter‘s beautiful travelogue/story of wandering the mountains of China looking for the Buddhist and Taoist hermits who maintain a tradition once much revered in Chinese culture.

Bottom left is The Collected Ghazals by the late, great Jim Harrison. Copper Canyon Press recently released this collection, as well as the book in the bottom center, Letters to Yesenin. I have been a fan of Jim Harrison since a college professor turned me on to him back in 1993, when he picked up a copy of Wolf. Since then I have read almost everything Harrison wrote, and have bookshelf dedicated to his poetry and prose.

On the bottom right is the new collection from Garrett Stack, Yeoman’s Work. I first heard of Stack when we published a few of his poems in an issue of The 3288 Review. This is an excellent collection, and well worth seeking out.

In reading news, I have so far read 18 poetry books and chapbooks, and am keeping a running tally of the list up on Instagram and Twitter. I haven’t taken a deep dive into poetry like this since the late 1990s, unless you count the thousands a year I read as editor of The 3288 Review, which is not really the same thing. The Sealey Challenge has been a wonderful experience and with 13 more books to read my mind will be in a wonderful place when NaNoWriMo starts on November 1.

I just finished reading For Exposure, Jason Sizemore’s brilliant history of Apex Publications, with contributions by half a dozen or so of the editors and other contributors, employees and supporters of his wonderful company. I picked up For Exposure at ConFusion back in, I think, 2015, when I managed to spend a few minutes talking to Sizemore about the trials and tribulations of running a small independent publishing company. He is a Righteous Dude, as the kids say these days, and I offer all the kudoes to him and his team for the work they do in the literary world.

Writing hasn’t been going as well as reading, though I managed to put down a couple hundred more words in the book as I try to work through this one lynchpin chapter and scene, from which the rest of the book will flow, which tells me I may need to just mash my fact against the keyboard until something clicks and I can move ahead. The goal is still to complete a first draft this year, and with luck even complete the draft during NaNoWriMo, though I am having more and more concrete thoughts about a series of short stories which might eventually become chapters in a new book. All I know is that I will spend a lot of time writing in November 2020, assuming the slings and arrows of the mundane world allow me the mental space and emotional clarity to do so.

Yet Another New Old Project : Procedural Terrain

John Winkelman

[CLICK HERE to see the Procedural Terrain Explorer]

From 2004 to about 2009 I spent a lot of time playing around with procedural generation, generative art, and game design and development. Naturally at one point all of those interests came together and I began to research ways that game maps could be built using procedural generation techniques. I started several games but they never went beyond the planning or rudimentary prototype stage. I learned a lot about programming and wrote a lot of code, but never really had much to show for it.

In November 2007 I successfully created a 3D-ish height map using Perlin Noise as generated by the built-in Actionscript functionality. Since a grayscale image is made up of 256 possible colors, it is simple to interpret the values as heights. And with 256 values to choose from it is simple to come up with color substitutions so that instead of something which looks like clouds you have patterns which look like lakes, plains and mountains.

Now I have successfully recreated and expanded upon that experiment, using plain Javascript. Instead of Perlin Noise, this version uses Simplex Noise, though if I move toward turning this into a full game I will switch to OpenSimplex or something, because Perlin Noise and Simplex Noise are copyrighted.

With the basic generator in place you can add whatever colors you want, to make the height map look like whatever you want.

More blog posts and detailed instructions will follow, but for now head over to the labs and enjoy the experiment!

 

 

The Warm Days of October

John Winkelman

We are in the middle of a gorgeous mid-October heat wave, with temperatures in the upper 70s during the day, and abundant sunshine and a light breeze which makes the autumn trees shimmer like kaleidoscopes seen through a good dose of psilocybin.

Only one book arrived at the house this week – Recognize Fascism, an anthology of resistance-themed short pieces edited by Crystal M. Huff and published by the always-excellent World Weaver Press, from a recently-completed Kickstarter campaign. This is a follow-up to the 2018 anthology Resist Fascism, also edited by Huff. If you think you have noticed a theme in the books which I have collected over the past couple of years, well, you are not mistaken.

In reading news I have managed to keep up the book-a-day pace for the Sealey Challenge, and having this volume and density of poetry in my life is doing wonderful things for my state of mind.

In writing news, I have done almost none over the past week though I think I have figured a way through the snarl which kept me from completing the current scene in the book. I will hit it Monday morning and see if my idea will play out on paper.

In other exciting news, I was just notified that a short story I had submitted back in January of this year has just been accepted for publication! The issue in question will go live on January 1, 2021, and at that point I will announce the venue and post the link and all other sorts of fanfare and information.

In all the chaos, misery and uncertainty abundant in the world right now, this was a very welcome piece of news.

Challenging Poetry

John Winkelman

The nights are definitely longer than the days now, and the days of October are so far mostly filled with clouds and rain. I would like to say that this means more time to read and write but unfortunately (or not) my schedule is not at all dependent on the whims and uncertainties of the weather.

Three new tomes to add to the collection this week. On the left is the newest from Michigan author Jim C. Hines, Tamora Carter: Goblin Queen, from Hines’ recent Kickstarter.

In the center is W. Todd Kaneko’s new poetry collection This is How the Bone Sings. I met Todd a couple of years ago at a Caffeinated Press event, and have been a fan of his poetry ever since.

On the right is the latest issue of Poetry Magazine, back from their summer hiatus.

In reading news, On October 1 I began The Sealey Challenge, wherein participants try to read a book or chapbook of poetry a day for a month. As luck would have it I have a great many unread poetry books and chapbooks, so coming up with a list was not a problem. I can set aside enough time in a day to read up to about 100 poems, though I may have to sacrifice some sleep in order to complete the requirement. I selected as many shorter works as I could, because I don’t want to just slam through the books without taking the time to appreciate and enjoy the works therein. I am posting updates to my progress on Instagram and Twitter, and will probably post collected updates here at the 10, 20, and 31 – book increments.

Nothing much to report in the writing department. I am stuck on a scene, and since I am only planning one scene ahead in the writing process, I need to see how this one turns out before I can lay out the details of the next one. I have given up on trying to force it, and instead in my free moments let my mind wander in that general direction and let my subconscious do the heavy lifting. Looks like NaNoWriMo will be a catch-up month for the novel, rather than a collection of new short stories. Of course it could also be both.

That’s all the literary news for now. Tune in next week for some new and exciting sameness.