Welcome to Poetry Month

(And a Poetry Passion Challenge)

April is coming fast! And along with April comes Poetry Month.

Poetry has a lot of opinions about it, some people think it drips with sap and emotions, other people think it’s the voice that our hearts and souls use to speak to the world… still others think it’s all dirty limericks and silly rhymes.

I once set out to write what I called, ‘the worst poetry in the world’. I was pretty happy with it the first couple of times I read it out. I made sure to put in lots of vampires and ‘blood dripped from her jellied…’ something or other I can’t remember now.

Blood Dripped from… my watch? No… can’t be right… (Photo by cottonbro on Pexels.com)

The problem was that it was actually pretty good poetry. I think the problem was that I was passionate in my desire to write bad poetry and that passion created really GOOD bad poetry. I was swimming in a sea of cliches and stabs at ineptitude, but I was so creative in my attempt to be a bad writer that I swam gracefully around the cliches and each sharp blade in the murky water that should have stabbed me? instead I danced on those blades and the turgid waters became a glimmering pool of mystery and with far more depth than if I had dove into the pool without attempting to make bad poetry. I had made poetry so bad that it was good.

Why do I bring this up?

Who Knows What May be in the Water? The Only Way to Know is to Get Wet!- Photo by Serena Summers

I think it’s important as we all start to think about poetry month to think about the nature of poetry. It’s something that is almost impossible to make a mess out of, so long as whatever you’re writing about (and here’s the big secret), you truly and honestly are passionate about the subject. Passion is a strange game to play at. You can play it in so many different arena: at the race track, in sporting events of all kinds, in competitions, in debates, for a religion, for a country, to destroy a country in a war, to destroy yourself in a war, for your family, for yourself, for, best of all, for love.

But passion can make us blind, selfish, foolish, stupid and wrong in almost every single one of these arenas unless we listen very carefully to our hearts and a little bit to our heads.

This is the true joy of poetry, it is passion.

In every poem, be in that poem. Taste it, feel it, smell it, SEE it, hear it, these are our passions! Does it make your heart quicken? Does it make you angry? Does it make a tear form, just so, at the corner of your eye? Or does it make you collapse when you realize all that you’ve lost and what a fool you’ve been? Even the most simple of poems in a prophecy to the right reader at the right time.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

This April, I dare you to submit to poetry month. Write a poem a day without a plan. At the end of April, StarkLight Press will open submissions to a brand new poetry anthology. We will be accepts writers filled with passion as well as a limited number of artists for cover design and internal art.

Photo by Yaroslav Shuraev on Pexels.com

We may select all thirty of your poems, or we may select only one. Poets will be paid $5 a poem. Poems must be new publications written April 2022. Rights to your poetry will be returned to you for July 17, 2022. You are free to publish them again but please site that they were originally published with StarkLight Press. Poetry only has to be written in April 2022 to qualify, you do not have to write or submit all thirty poems for poetry month to enter!

Stay tuned, as always for more events, contests and new books at StarkLight Press. You saw it here first: Black, White and Read all over

Deadline for entries is May 15, 2022. Please edit your poetry before sending it in, we hprefer your best work! Click on CONTACT US to find out how to submit if you’re a newbie to StarkLight Press.

Enderby Anthology Contest Winners Announced!

Our upcoming anthology of poetry, short stories, flash fiction and illustrations featuring Enderby, BC is on its way- and here are the writers, poets and artists who have won places in this flagship tome!

The winners of our poetry and writing contest are:

Sharla Toews

William Norton

Kyla Nicks

Alfred Elkins

Anthony Stark

Michael McArthur

Natalie Nicks

Wendy Shellard

Leanne Caine

Virginia Carraway Stark

Winners of our art contest will be released later in August, so be sure to stay tuned!

Short Story Contest 2020

Exclusive Writing Contest: Location Specific!

StarkLight Press and the Enderby Chamber of Commerce are happy to present, “The River Lands”

Started in honour of poetry month, it was expanded with requests for short stories and other types of creative submissions including pen and ink and other black white or greyscale art.

There are no word count minimums for poetry. Short stories must be under 15,000 words. There is no payment for poetry, you will get a free digital copy. Short stories are paid $10 and must be a minimum of 5000 words to qualify as a short story.

You retain the rights to your work. We are looking for original pieces that haven’t been published before. This includes online publication. We ask that your work not be submitted elsewhere when it is submitted for this anthology. Multiple submissions are okay and will be considered. After publication you must wait six months before republication of your work. Small excerpts for promotion are encouraged. If you submit a short story we do not retain rights to your world or characters in perpetuity, before, after and during publication.

You will not be paid for copies of the anthology sold, nor necessarily alerted to the number of sales. Winners of the contest will be alerted by email and announced on the Chamber of Commerce website as well as on StarkLight Press.

The cut off date has been moved to July 2 2020 as many local writers were hampered by Covid-19 and asked for more time. We have had a lot of National and International interest in this contest, because of this, we ask that you send in a bio of under 100 words with you connection to Enderby, BC, Canada. Preference is given to residence of Enderby. If you wish to publish under a pen name, please let us know your legal name but you can be published under your pen name and announced under it as well.

If you do not have a connection to Enderby, please do not fabricate one.

If you would like to tell a story about one of the ‘other’ Enderbies, as we have received several submissions for, these will be considered as well for the, ‘Society of Enderbies’ section. This section was generated after the original announcement of the anthology in response to people misunderstanding what the anthology is about. Because we do want to create an interest in the history of the name Enderby, these have been added to the list of considerations.

Submissions can be sent to:

starklightpress@protonmail.com

cc enderbywritingsociety@gmail.com

Leanne Caine Chats with StarkLight Press

Recently, StarkLight Press sat down with Leanne Caine, long-time author and contributor, to chat with her about her story in our latest anthology StarkLight 5.

Leanne is author of a number of short stories and flash fiction, has contributed for the past four years to the StarkLight Press Poetry Marathon, and in addition has written for us in several collaborative novels, including our Tales From Space novels The Arkellan Treaty, Space Stranded.

Leanne is currently working on a memoir as well as contributing to the long-awaited sequel to The Irregulars, StarkLight Press’s first novel about the underground world of psychically-gifted homeless children in North America.

 

SLP: Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you’ve been up to in the past few years.

This is a hard question for me. I disappeared off the social media map and went back to ghost writing for awhile because I have been going through heavy waters.

The worst thing in the world happened to me, at least, the worst thing that I could imagine, my daughter’s bio dad put his head back into our life. After not being there for her for her entire life he showed up and destabilized everything and on top of it all called me an unfit mother. He used my writing to ‘prove’ it. Ouch.

I went back to ghosting and just about became a ghost myself in the process. It hasn’t been an easy time.
I never wanted that man in my life and I love my little girl, but that isn’t because she reminds me in any way of her sperm donor. I don’t mean I went to a sperm bank, I mean one of his little suckers got by my defences and gave me the only thing in my life I love other than writing.

Fortunately; my baby’s got a good head on her shoulders and sperm donor waited until she was old enough to make up her own mind.

That’s probably more personal than you meant about this question but that’s what I’ve been up to.

I’ve been stripped naked and shorn for all the world to see and nearly lost my baby, nearly lost my writing. I’m back and my daughter isn’t going anywhere.

SLP: Explain for our audience a little bit about the inspiration for your tale, and the themes that inform it.

My story is reaching back to the old stories about revenants and vampires. I was tired of the modern stories about vampires that seem to deviate further and further away from the original stories that our ancestors told about them.

A long time ago, we had a lot of reasons to fear corpses. We still have reasons to fear corpses, but now those reasons are more or less medically founded and we fear them because we don’t want to be contaminated. Even so, we’re also worried that the sheet will fall down, their eyes will fly open and we’ll be forced to fight with the body of the one that we loved.

It’s hard, if you’ve ever seen the body of a loved one, you might get it a bit. They go from being warm and loving to cold and, well, gone. Their eyes change and there’s this feeling of being alone, and yet there’s also the sense of being around a really creepy doll that it could become animated by anything at any point.

It’s armed with claws and teeth and the weight of a human body and it’s scary!

People, even now, often dream about their dead loved ones coming to the door and being asked to be let in. That’s where this story starts, a young wife lets her dead husband in and they make love… well, that’s the implication. It actually starts with the fruit of their intercourse, a demonic vampire baby that’s birth kills its young mother.

The baby’s a monster. There’s lots of signs that used to be well known as signs of vampire babies, this ones got several of them. The midwife thinks about killing the baby but she hasn’t been christianized enough to go running to the priest and start killing babies. Well, maybe in this case that’s the wrong thing, maybe not. It’s a story that’s caught on the cusp between the old ways and the new. There used to be old ways of dealing with vampire babies that would be at least as effective but the midwife’s hands are tied by just enough Christian influence for her to be rather impotent. The result and demon baby on a rampage.

You can read the rest to see how it turns out for everyone. The short answer is: not good.

SLP: What’s your preferred method for writing: computer/smartphone, typewriter, hand, voice transcription? Tell us the most unusual place you ever wrote down a tale- in the elevator at work, on horseback, in a crowded subway?

I really miss Aurora being a baby, it was awesome when she was teething and would scream and hit random key and delete my work. That had to be my favorite. *jk*

Seriously, it’s nice to have a little girl turning into a big girl, I can have some quiet time and it’s a luxury after being a single parent all these years. I went from being a kid at home to being a mommy and it was pretty hard. There’s a lake here and my favorite place to write is anywhere on the lake. I take my computer to the beach a lot and other times I use my friends’ boat or even houseboat for awhile if I don’t have to work. That’s the best, even if I’m limited to pen and paper and have to type it all up when I get home. There’s something about the peace and quiet of being removed from the ground and not being connected at all that makes writing more fluid than anywhere else.

I hate writing in the heat.

I hate writing at my parent’s house even though it has air conditioning and a pool because they’ve never stopped saying ‘I told you this would happen’ since I suddenly got real fat my last year in high school and then suddenly lost all the weight and had this crying baby…

SLP: Where do you like to go best to recharge your creative batteries?

Again, the water. I like to swim. Ironically, I also like to hike in the desert. There’s something about the extreme heat and the deprivation that I like. I don’t like to be sun burned so I go out covered up because I like being fair and have my gothic moments. I like to go skiing and snowboarding in the winter, there’s something about it that’s similar to swimming.

Otherwise, I guess I like to go out and dance my brains out on the dance floor and act like I’m a lot stupider than I am for a portion of the night and blow off some steam that way.

SLP:What, in your opinion is author kryptonite? (antithetical to the creative writing process)

Dealing with family problems. Those are awful. Feeling overwhelmed and having no privacy or quiet time. That sucks all kinds of balls. Feeling like you’re losing what matters most to you. Being attacked for what you’ve already written.

 

SLP: What are your three favorite mainstream books, and what are your three favorite indie/independently published works?

This question is hard and is responsible for this being late. I’ll tell the truth. I’ve been re-reading group anthologies that I’ve been in in StarkLight and getting ready for next projects. I haven’t had a lot of time for other reading. I’ve been reading the entire GAF Mainframe and all the books I can get my hands on. A lot of the other authors have been writing stuff on the side for The Irregulars and I’ve been sinking my greedy little hooks into that too.

I spent too long on this question, I wanted to make something sound super profound and make me sound deep, but no, oh, and also some manga that likely few have heard of but is absolutely silly and serves no earthly purpose.

SLP: What is the last movie you saw? Give our authors a brief review.

The last movie I saw was a Chucky binge. I don’t think I need to give a review. Doll comes to life, doll kills everyone. Usually, some poor kid gets blamed for being a little psycho. Awww, poor traumatized kids! Watch their family get hacked to pieces and then they get called psychos. Next movie comes along and they’re in a psychiatric hospital, just about to leave and then some dumbass psychiatrist decides that before they leave they need to face their fear and they give the guy a Chucky doll. Wow. Jerk!

It’s a funny horror series if you’re into that sort of thing (which I am) and I love the one where Chucky gets a girlfriend. I can’t recall the name of the actress, but man, she is an awesome actress. She did some stuff with John Waters but mostly does voice acting because she has an amazing voice. She’s a bit buxom and I think that’s why she didn’t do more acting acting, I thought she was pretty hot (but not as a doll, terrifying as a doll).

Anyway, horror binges are awesome and they’re also good things to watch when you’re working on a scary story for ambience.

SLP:  What are your next big projects, so that our audience can keep an eye out for them.

I’m working on the sequel to The Irregulars from StarkLight Press. I’m hoping to work more with the character, Jet, that I’m writing. I love this series so much, it’s one of the best things I’ve ever written and I love working with the other writers on it. When you get the right people working with a project it just ROCKS.

Thanks for taking the time to fill out our StarkLight Volume 5 Questionnaire!

More of the Great Richard White- plus, Cover Art!

You can find Richard White’s great vlog on YouTube here , where tonight at 8 eastern, 5 Pacific, you can watch our own Anthony Stark, BOFA award winner and two-time BOFA nominee, talk about his graphic design work in covers and interiors, for StarkLight Press and other publishing houses.

 

Short Story Anthology Annoucement

With the winter holidays around the corner, we are proud to announce a good-old fashioned holiday anthology. I mean, very old-fashioned: we are seeking stories about traditional pagan themes (please, no Krampus, we’re full up with Krampus!)

If you have story ideas for ancient holiday traditions (or ancient traditions that might intersect with fireworks against more modern ones) send your story to starklightpress@protonmail.com by November 15, 2019.

You can find out some of the amazing prizes and opportunities you can win here– we look forward to this anthology, and to your submissions!

Incidentally, this graphic is from a great blog, Romania Dacia, which you should check out!

Virginia Carraway Stark chats with Richard White

Author and Commentator Richard White, host of the famed Authors Write Aloud vlog, spends a fascinating show with Virginia Carraway Stark chatting about the rewarding, sometimes slippery, sometimes explosive world of blogging as an author. Joining them is author Leslie Conzatti, who pens speculative fiction and blog works.  You can watch the video here:

 

Leanne Caine Chats with StarkLight Press

Leanne Caine takes a few minutes to tell us about her new story and Life, the Universe and Everything.

1. Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you’ve been up to in the past few years.

 

This is a hard question for me. I disappeared off the social media map and went back to ghost writing for awhile because I have been going through heavy waters.

The worst thing in the world happened to me, at least, the worst thing that I could imagine, my daughter’s bio dad put his head back into our life. After not being there for her for her entire life he showed up and destabilized everything and on top of it all called me an unfit mother. He used my writing to ‘prove’ it. Ouch.

I went back to ghosting and just about became a ghost myself in the process. It hasn’t been an easy time.
I never wanted that man in my life and I love my little girl, but that isn’t because she reminds me in any way of her sperm donor. I don’t mean I went to a sperm bank, I mean one of his little suckers got by my defences and gave me the only thing in my life I love other than writing.

Fortunately; my baby’s got a good head on her shoulders and sperm donor waited until she was old enough to make up her own mind.

That’s probably more personal than you meant about this question but that’s what I’ve been up to.

I’ve been stripped naked and shorn for all the world to see and nearly lost my baby, nearly lost my writing. I’m back and my daughter isn’t going anywhere.

 

2. Explain for our audience a little bit about the inspiration for your tale, and the themes that inform it.

 

My story is reaching back to the old stories about revenants and vampires. I was tired of the modern stories about vampires that seem to deviate further and further away from the original stories that our ancestors told about them.

A long time ago, we had a lot of reasons to fear corpses. We still have reasons to fear corpses, but now those reasons are more or less medically founded and we fear them because we don’t want to be contaminated. Even so, we’re also worried that the sheet will fall down, their eyes will fly open and we’ll be forced to fight with the body of the one that we loved.

It’s hard, if you’ve ever seen the body of a loved one, you might get it a bit. They go from being warm and loving to cold and, well, gone. Their eyes change and there’s this feeling of being alone, and yet there’s also the sense of being around a really creepy doll that it could become animated by anything at any point.

It’s armed with claws and teeth and the weight of a human body and it’s scary!

People, even now, often dream about their dead loved ones coming to the door and being asked to be let in. That’s where this story starts, a young wife lets her dead husband in and they make love… well, that’s the implication. It actually starts with the fruit of their intercourse, a demonic vampire baby that’s birth kills its young mother.

The baby’s a monster. There’s lots of signs that used to be well known as signs of vampire babies, this ones got several of them. The midwife thinks about killing the baby but she hasn’t been christianized enough to go running to the priest and start killing babies. Well, maybe in this case that’s the wrong thing, maybe not. It’s a story that’s caught on the cusp between the old ways and the new. There used to be old ways of dealing with vampire babies that would be at least as effective but the midwife’s hands are tied by just enough Christian influence for her to be rather impotent. The result and demon baby on a rampage.

You can read the rest to see how it turns out for everyone. The short answer is: not good.

 

3. What’s your preferred method for writing: computer/smartphone, typewriter, hand, voice transcription? Tell us the most unusual place you ever wrote down a tale- in the elevator at work, on horseback, in a crowded subway?

 

I really miss Aurora being a baby, it was awesome when she was teething and would scream and hit random key and delete my work. That had to be my favorite. *jk*

Seriously, it’s nice to have a little girl turning into a big girl, I can have some quiet time and it’s a luxury after being a single parent all these years. I went from being a kid at home to being a mommy and it was pretty hard. There’s a lake here and my favorite place to write is anywhere on the lake. I take my computer to the beach a lot and other times I use my friends’ boat or even houseboat for awhile if I don’t have to work. That’s the best, even if I’m limited to pen and paper and have to type it all up when I get home. There’s something about the peace and quiet of being removed from the ground and not being connected at all that makes writing more fluid than anywhere else.

I hate writing in the heat.

I hate writing at my parent’s house even though it has air conditioning and a pool because they’ve never stopped saying ‘I told you this would happen’ since I suddenly got real fat my last year in high school and then suddenly lost all the weight and had this crying baby…

 

4. Where do you like to go best to recharge your creative batteries?

 

Again, the water. I like to swim. Ironically, I also like to hike in the desert. There’s something about the extreme heat and the deprivation that I like. I don’t like to be sun burned so I go out covered up because I like being fair and have my gothic moments. I like to go skiing and snowboarding in the winter, there’s something about it that’s similar to swimming.

Otherwise, I guess I like to go out and dance my brains out on the dance floor and act like I’m a lot stupider than I am for a portion of the night and blow off some steam that way.

 

5. What, in your opinion is author kryptonite? (antithetical to the creative writing process)

 

Dealing with family problems. Those are awful. Feeling overwhelmed and having no privacy or quiet time. That sucks all kinds of balls. Feeling like you’re losing what matters most to you. Being attacked for what you’ve already written.

 

6. What are your three favorite mainstream books, and what are your three favorite indie/independently published works?

 

This question is hard and is responsible for this being late. I’ll tell the truth. I’ve been re-reading group anthologies that I’ve been in in StarkLight and getting ready for next projects. I haven’t had a lot of time for other reading. I’ve been reading the entire GAF Mainframe and all the books I can get my hands on. A lot of the other authors have been writing stuff on the side for The Irregulars and I’ve been sinking my greedy little hooks into that too.

I spent too long on this question, I wanted to make something sound super profound and make me sound deep, but no, oh, and also some manga that likely few have heard of but is absolutely silly and serves no earthly purpose.

 

7. What is the last movie you saw? Give our authors a brief review.

 

The last movie I saw was a Chucky binge. I don’t think I need to give a review. Doll comes to life, doll kills everyone. Usually, some poor kid gets blamed for being a little psycho. Awww, poor traumatized kids! Watch their family get hacked to pieces and then they get called psychos. Next movie comes along and they’re in a psychiatric hospital, just about to leave and then some dumbass psychiatrist decides that before they leave they need to face their fear and they give the guy a Chucky doll. Wow. Jerk!

It’s a funny horror series if you’re into that sort of thing (which I am) and I love the one where Chucky gets a girlfriend. I can’t recall the name of the actress, but man, she is an awesome actress. She did some stuff with John Waters but mostly does voice acting because she has an amazing voice. She’s a bit buxom and I think that’s why she didn’t do more acting acting, I thought she was pretty hot (but not as a doll, terrifying as a doll).

Anyway, horror binges are awesome and they’re also good things to watch when you’re working on a scary story for ambience.

 

8. What are your next big projects, so that our audience can keep an eye out for them.

 

I’m working on the sequel to The Irregulars from StarkLight Press. I’m hoping to work more with the character, Jet, that I’m writing. I love this series so much, it’s one of the best things I’ve ever written and I love working with the other writers on it. When you get the right people working with a project it just ROCKS.

 

Thanks for taking the time to fill out our StarkLight Volume 5 Questionnaire!

Congratulations to our Editor in Chief Virginia Stark!

I’m a number one bestselling, award winning author… when did this happen??? Well, it’s been happening for a long time and as to HOW did this happen? I just kept going and don’t ever give up. I always forget that I got this one! I need to staple a list of awards and achievements […]

via I’m a # 1 Bestselling Author… but there’s more to it than that! — virginiastark

The Horror, the Horror…

Be certain to tune in to Richard White’s author round table discussion about the genre, its process and how these talented authors approach the subject.

**** Spoiler Alert!****

Our Virginia Carraway Stark might be mentioning a new, supernatural horror collaborative to  which she lends her keyboard- listen here for the latest news about The Irregulars, Volume 2!

Many thanks to Richard White and his panel for sharing this interesting discussion!